A teleosemantic approach to information in the brain

The brain is often taken to be a paradigmatic example of a signaling system with semantic and representational properties, in which neurons are senders and receivers of information carried in action potentials. A closer look at this picture shows that it is not as appealing as it might initially seem in explaining the function of the brain. Working from several sender-receiver models within the teleosemantic framework, I will first argue that two requirements must be met for a system to support genuine semantic information: 1. The receiver must be competent—that is, it must be able to extract rewards from its environment on the basis of the signals that it receives. 2. The receiver must have some flexibility of response relative to the signal received. In the second part of the paper, this initial framework will be applied to neural processes, pointing to the surprising conclusion that signaling at the single-neuron level is only weakly semantic at best. Contrary to received views, neurons will have little or no access to semantic information (though their patterns of activity may carry plenty of quantitative, correlational information) about the world outside the organism. Genuine representation of the world requires an organism-level receiver of semantic information, to which any particular set of neurons makes only a small contribution.     

Sunday Lunch in Fiji: Continuity and Transformation in Ideas of the Household

In this article, I compare drawings of "Sunday lunch" produced by Fijian village children in 1990 and 2005 and their responses to prepared drawings in 1982, which show remarkable continuity over time. I suggest this continuity is largely attributable to the ritualization of eating practices. At the same time, the children's data indicate that a substantive, if subtle, change is occurring in ideas of the inclusiveness of the household; I suggest that this change may be a function of an intensification of commodity exchange in day-to-day village life. As the children's data demonstrate, continuity as well as transformation in ideas over time may be understood as a function of the self-same ontogenetic process through which we make sense of our relations with others in the lived world. I argue that such ethnographic studies of ontogeny enable us both to appreciate the material validity of our informants' ideas and to render them analytical.     

The role of observers' gaze behaviour when watching object manipulation tasks: predicting and evaluating the consequences of action

When watching an actor manipulate objects, observers, like the actor, naturally direct their gaze to each object as the hand approaches and typically maintain gaze on the object until the hand departs. Here, we probed the function of observers'' eye movements, focusing on two possibilities: (i) that observers'' gaze behaviour arises from processes involved in the prediction of the target object of the actor''s reaching movement and (ii) that this gaze behaviour supports the evaluation of mechanical events that arise from interactions between the actor''s hand and objects. Observers watched an actor reach for and lift one of two presented objects. The observers'' task was either to predict the target object or judge its weight. Proactive gaze behaviour, similar to that seen in self-guided action–observation, was seen in the weight judgement task, which requires evaluating mechanical events associated with lifting, but not in the target prediction task. We submit that an important function of gaze behaviour in self-guided action observation is the evaluation of mechanical events associated with interactions between the hand and object. By comparing predicted and actual mechanical events, observers, like actors, can gain knowledge about the world, including information about objects they may subsequently act upon.     

'We don't know our descent': how the Gitanos of Jarana manage the past

Although Gypsies have often been described as people 'oriented towards the present', the question of how their approach to the past might illuminate their particular mode of being in the world has been left largely untheorized. In fact, understanding how Gypsies manage the past is essential to understanding the processes through which they survive as a group in the midst of non-Gypsy society. In this article I analyse how the Gitanos of Jarana (Madrid) work upon the past so as to remove certain past events and periods from the communal gaze and to ensure that others receive only limited elaboration. I also explore the links between these Gitanos' downplaying of the past in their accounts of themselves and their particular ways of organizing social relations. Therefore, my focus lies on the relationships between the past and the imagined community, and between the latter and its structural supports.     

Sultans of Spin: Syrian Sacred Music on the World Stage

This article examines how the performance of a variety of Islamic music in transnational cultural circuits helps to promote the idea of a style of sacred music within the category of world music. Taking as an example the performance of the mawlawiyya, or "Whirling Dervish," music and dance by a Syrian–based ensemble, I show how the idea of an authentic local Syrian sacred music tradition requires its performance globally. I use the concept of the "world stage" to examine how musical performance practices that are represented as authentic local traditions obtain both their authenticity and their local specificity through their staging in global contexts. I further explore how such musical styles as sacred and Sufi emerge as naturalized categories in world music discourse, and how processes of differentiation and commodification reconfigure both the "local" and "global." [Keywords: world music, globalization, style, Syria, Islam]     

Jean Rouch's ethnographic path

This article considers the multiple influences that have shaped Jean Rouch's ethnographic gaze upon the Songhay people of Niger. Marcel Griaule, Rouch's mentor, undoubtedly influenced his student's ethnographic approach to Songhay. But Rouch was equally influenced, I am convinced, by his direct and unforgettable confrontation with the mysteries of the Songhay world. After a discussion of the methodological and theoretical orientations of the Griaule school, I analyze Rouch's major ethnographic work, La Religion et la magie Songhay, focusing upon how Griaulian epistemology and Songhay realities molded the textual presentation. I then discuss several of Rouch's major films—Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé, The Lion Hunters, Les Maîtres Fous, and Tourou et Bitti, placing them within an ethnographic and epistemological context. This analysis leads to a consideration of Rouch's unrecognized contribution to anthropology.     

Documenting discontent: Struggles for recognition in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea

Within the context of the Purari Delta’s transforming materialities of resource extraction, and the legacy of the Tom Kabu iconoclastic modernist movement (1946–69), I examine the processes of materialisation bound up with two related but different things: heirlooms (eve uku) and documents (Incorporated Land Group (ILG) forms). Eve uku (‘hand head’) lie within a continuum of things (names, relations, totemic ancestral spirit‐beings and sites in the environment) through which ancestral actions are shown to have happened, and descent groups’ identities manifest. However, given the ambiguous status of the traditional past among the I’ai, the power of these forms is circumscribed to the village thus making them ineffectual tokens in the bid to secure royalties from resource extraction. Instead, highly coveted documents known as ILG certificates have emerged as efficacious things by which royalties can be secured. Examining these certificates as objects, I investigate how these documents help materialise anew descent groups, communities’ relations to their environment and thus their aspirations for development with its attending materialities. The problem for the I’ai, however, remains how to obtain these documents and, as with eve uku, how to control them.     

Tradisi and Moderen,Village and State: Emergent Tensions in a Sasak Health Quest

On Lombok island, in the province of West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, indigenous medicine and biomedicine coexist. Nevertheless, biomedicine, a product of modernity and the development of the state has been superimposed on village life along with other state institutions such as education. In this paper I analyse the processes involved in Sasak villagers' quest for health. Operating within various and sometimes overlapping social fields and conflicting discourses, villagers utilise both local indigenous practices as well as the Indonesian national health system in their quest. Because local or ordinary knowledge is a rich resource for interpretation, I describe the health quest through the participant individuals: family members, neighbours, doctors and nursing personnel involved. The subjectivity of the individual participants contributes to the intricate unfolding of health seeking quests to expose the various tensions which emerge between tradition (tradisi [I]) and modernity (moderen [I]) and between state and village.     

Crab antics: the moral and political economy of greed accusations in the submerging Sundarbans delta of India

The livelihood of crab collecting, practised for generations in the Sundarbans forest of India, has undergone a radical moral makeover in recent years. Largely landless crab fishers are now the subject of frequent public denunciations by local authorities for their supposed greed and reckless endangerment of the entire ecosystem. While greed and its related category of need emerge from a local moral ecology of the region, internationally funded conservation campaigns and recent disruptions in the global crab supply chain reveal how accusations are activated and the means through which they play out amidst pre-existing village hierarchies. This article accounts for the political, economic, and moral shifts that underpin these accusations. In counterpoint, I present the defences of the accused, and explore crab collectors’ notions of a sufficient life and the rich moral distinctions they themselves make between greed (lobh), need (aubhav), desire (chahida), and habit (swabhav). I then step back to show the broader political contours that shape the discourse of ‘greedy’ crab collectors. I argue that both the conservation movement and allied state actors have distorted the material and moral resources intended to combat climate change and other environmental threats by scapegoating the politically disenfranchised: local fishers. Powerful stakeholders, as a result of their own political impotency, are deployed in a game of crab antics that fails to address the underlying environmental catastrophe while displacing the psychic burden of greed onto the poor.     

An Answer to Schrödinger’s What Is Life?

That semiosis is specific to the living world is the cornerstone of biosemiotics. For checking an information-theoretic interpretation of this statement already proposed at the 2009 Biosemiotics Gathering in Prague, it is first attempted here to answer a question asked by Kupiec and Sonigo in Ni Dieu ni Gène (2000) on what differentiates living objects and those resulting from a geophysical process. Similar questions were asked by Schr?dinger in his essay What Is Life? where the emphasis was laid on the relationship of the atomic scale of the genes and the macroscopic scale of living beings. This essay was published in 1944, before information was introduced as a scientific entity, at a time when DNA was not yet identified as the vector of heredity. We undertake answering some of these questions, arguing that the living world is made of organisms, i.e., of assemblies possessing in a genome the information needed for their replication and their maintenance while the inanimate world only contains aggregates. In short, a biological process keeps its order through the use of information. For defining order, it is proposed that an orderly object can be produced by a construction (e.g., the copy of a template) using available data within some given context. In other words, replicating an orderly object does not bring new information into its context. Order in this meaning appears as specific to the living world, at variance with the inanimate world which is basically disorderly. A better understanding of what separates the living world from the inanimate world results: the use of information is the distinguishing feature which defines their border. Any living thing contains a symbolic information, referred to as its genome, inscribed into DNA molecules. This genome can indeed be copied but, its support being embedded in the physical world, it incurs disturbances which result in symbol errors. Keeping its order thus needs endowing any genome with error correction ability: it must belong to a redundant code, i.e., a set of sequences separated by some minimum distance. The larger its minimum distance, the more immune to errors are the elements of a code. Then genomes become as distinct as to ensure order. Identity and specificity result. Although conservative according to the above definition of order, the living world actually exhibits an extreme diversity which even tends to increase as evolution proceeds. In sharp contrast, homogeneity and monotony are observed in the inanimate world, assumed however non-conservative. In order to solve this paradox and justify the proposed definition of order, it is argued that the error-correcting means which ensure the conservation of genomes fail with some low, but non-zero, probability. Although very infrequent, regeneration errors result in genomes largely different from the initial ones; and the correction mechanisms conserve the mutated genomes just as the original ones. The operation of life changes scales, since the regeneration errors which originate in atomic events have observable consequences at the macroscopic scale.     

Driving as night falls: the contribution of retinal flow and visual direction to the control of steering

We have the ability to locomote at high speeds, and we usually negotiate bends safely, even when visual information is degraded, for example, when driving at night. There are three sources of visual information that could support successful steering. An observer fixating a steering target that is eccentric to the current heading must rotate their gaze. The gaze rotation may be detected by using head and eye movement signals (extra-retinal direction: ERD) or their retinal counterpart, visual direction (VD). The gaze rotation also transforms the global retinal flow (RF) field, which may enable direct steering judgments. In this study, we manipulate VD and RF to determine their contribution toward steering a curved path in the presence of ERD. The results suggest a model that uses a weighted combination of all three information sources, but results also suggest that this weighting may change in reduced visibility, such as in low-light conditions.     

Facing Death,Gazing Inward: End-of-Life and the Transformation of Clinical Subjectivity in Thailand

In this article, I describe a new form of clinical subjectivity in Thailand, emerging out of public debate over medical care at the end of life. Following the controversial high-tech death of the famous Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, many began to denounce modern death as falling prey to social ills in Thai society, such as consumerism, technology-worship, and the desire to escape the realities of existence. As a result, governmental and non-governmental organizations have begun to focus on the end-of-life as a locus for transforming Thai society. Moving beyond the classic outward focus of the medical gaze, they have begun teaching clinicians and patients to gaze inward instead, to use the suffering inherent in medicine and illness to face the nature of existence and attain inner wisdom. In this article, I describe the emergence of this new gaze and its major conceptual components, including a novel idea of what it means to be ‘human,’ as well as a series of technologies used to craft this humanity: confession, “facing suffering,” and untying “knots” in the heart. I also describe how this new subjectivity has begun to change the long-stable Buddhist concept of death as taking place at a moment in time, giving way for a new concept of “end-of-life,” an elongated interval to be experienced, studied, and used for inner wisdom.     

Women and the Iranian Revolution: A village case study

Conclusion All in all, the activism of the Aliabad seyyid women in the Iranian Revolution followed the lines of traditional concerns, traditional methods, and traditional constraints on the activities of women. Women hoped for improved justice, safety for their families, and restoration of a semblance of peace in the village and the nation as a whole. Women's political methods were those of social interaction and use of their verbal abilities, emotional displays, and physical presence to show support. They followed the usual constraints on their behavior by marching in the company of their usual network of companions, separate from men and covered with their chadors, and did not neglect their families and households.The two changes were in the level of political involvement: national rather than local level, and the locus of political activity—Shiraz rather than the village of Aliabad. The local level of political activity was no longer the level at which policy and forces determined the safety and welfare of their family and relatives. With the Shah's centralization program, power over the lives of villagers lay at higher levels. With the merging of local level politics and national level politics during the incidents of violence on December 7 and 8, 1978, women began to realize that the target of their political activism must also be at higher levels. In hopes of having some effect on national level politics and thereby on the safety and welfare of their family members, the Aliabad seyyid women traveled into Shiraz to demonstrate in the revolutionary movement

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Effects of long-term space flights on the organization of the horizontal gaze fixation reaction

The results of the Russian-Austrian space experiment Monimir, which was a part of the international space program Austromir, are presented. The characteristics of the horizontal gaze fixation reaction (hGFR) to the visual targets were studied during long-term space flights. Seven crewmembers of the space station Mir participated in our experiment. The subjects were tested four times before the flight, five times during the flight, and three to four times after landing. During the flight and after accomplishing, the characteristics of gaze fixation reaction changed regularly: the reaction time and coefficient of the gain of vestibular-ocular reflex increased; the velocities of eye-head movements increased and decreased. These changes were indicative of a disturbed control of the vestibular-ocular reflex under microgravity conditions because of variability of the vestibular input activity. The cosmonauts that had flight and non-flight professional specializations differed in strategies of their adaptation to the microgravity conditions. In the former, exposure to microgravity was accompanied by gaze hypermetry and inhibition of head movements; conversely, in the latter, the velocity of head movements increased, whereas that of saccades decreased.     

“The Simulacra of Morality”: Islamic Veiling, Religious Politics and the Limits of Liberalism

On December 17, 2003, French President Jaques Chirac went on television to explain the immediate necessity of passing a law recently proposed by the Stasi commission. This commission had been empowered to explore the failures of the last thirty years of French immigration policy in terms of integration. It had also been specifically instructed to investigate threats to the concept of laicite, the rigorous French version of secularism and the separation of the Church and the State. Chirac explained that, following the commission’s advice as well as that of numerous experts, he had centered on a policy to deal with these issues: We shall do so by bringing to life the principle of secularism, which is a pillar of our constitution. It expresses our wish to live together in respect, dialogue and tolerance. Secularism guarantees freedom of conscience. It protects the freedom to believe or not to believe. He then expanded upon what this freedom requires: It is the neutrality of the public sphere which enables the harmonious existence side by side of different religions. Like all freedoms, the freedom to express one’s faith can only have limits in the freedom of others, and in the compliance with rules of life in society. Religious freedom, which our country respects and protects, must not be abused, it must not call general rules into question, and it must not infringe the freedom of belief of others. Finally, Chirac, building to a rhetorical climax, came to the essence of the new law which had provoked so much commentary around the world: In all conscience, it is my view that the wearing of clothes or of symbols which conspicuously demonstrate religious affiliations must be banned in state schools. The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world in which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science is in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme... we posses indeed simulacra of morality... but we have lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.     

Designing the Ocean Policy Future: An Essay on How I Am Going To Do That

A new millennium offers an opportunity to think about possible future directions in ocean policy. But such an effort must take account of the considerable changes in the world political and economic system since 1989 - globalization with its rapid transportation, communication, economic interdependence; population increase, increased pressure on the stock of the world's natural resources and spaces, the end of the Cold War but with diffusion of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and a rise in world environmental consciousness. In this context we must develop patterns of sustainable use, and learn how to implement forward look principles for ocean management such as those propounded by the Luso-American Foundation. However, we have not calculated the political and economic costs or understood how we will achieve outcomes consistent with the principles. These are critical to successful global ocean governance. We understand what must be achieved but not by whom or how.     

The Anna Karenina Principle Applied to Ecological Risk Assessments of Multiple Stressors

Successful ecological risk assessments are all alike; every unsuccessful ecological risk assessment fails in its own way. Tolstoy posited a similar analogy in his novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By that, Tolstoy meant that for a marriage to be happy, it had to succeed in several key aspects. Failure on even one of these aspects, and the marriage is doomed. In this paper, I argue that the Anna Karenina principle also applies to ecological risk assessments involving multiple stressors. In particular, I argue that multiple stressors assessments and environmental decision making will not have a happy marriage unless the following can be achieved: (1) there must be societal and political buy-in to the assessment and decision-making process; (2) the assessment must have the latitude to consider a wide range of stressors and potential risk management options; (3) there must be a commitment to following a rigorous focusing of the assessment and to expending resources for model development and data collection; and (4) an adaptive management strategy must be adopted wherein risk management actions are undertaken, system response intensively observed and assessed, and revised management actions taken as appropriate. Failure to meet any of the above criteria for success will doom a multiple stressors assessment and prevent its use in effective decision-making.     

“I Hate White People!”—Subverting the Televisual Gaze

I have previously argued that the other viewing the Self highlights the ramifications of the question “Who are they?” vis-à-vis notions of “Who are we?” and that the answer to the former directly shapes and informs the latter, as Fourth World people are forced to negotiate their identity upon exposure to First World television. In this article, I examine a particular group of subaltern viewers who reassign the roles of self and Other in order to preserve, defend, and construct their own selfhood. Because they look and act differently from those in the mediated mainstream, Navajo television viewers create oppositional identities by understanding themselves first in relation to and then opposed to standardized models. Subverting the televisual gaze is their way of articulating experiences of powerlessness in a white-dominated society as well as a means of communicating a discourse of resistance to the dominant ideology.     

Evaluation of the efficacy of Olyset® Plus in a village‐based cohort study in the Cukurova Plain,Turkey, in an area of hyperendemic cutaneous leishmaniasis

The aim of this study was to measure the protective efficacy of Olyset® Plus, a new long‐lasting factory‐treated insecticidal net (LLIN) incorporated with 2% permethrin and 1% of the synergist piperonyl butoxide (PBO), against cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) transmission under field conditions. A village‐scale trial, promoting the use of LLIN by the local inhabitants of the study area was conducted as a pilot study in a new hyperendemic focus of CL caused by a Leishmania infantum/L. donovani hybrid parasite transmitted by proven vector species Phlebotomus tobbi in Cukurova Plain, Adana, Turkey, between May, 2013 and May, 2014. The study area comprised eight villages; two of them were selected as an intervention village with Olyset® Plus net (Kizillar) and a control village without net application (Malihidirli). Six villages with surrounding allopatric barriers were utilized as a buffer zone cluster between intervention and control villages. Monthly entomological surveys were performed in the intervention and control villages and Damyeri, representing the other six villages, to collect adults of Phlebotomus tobbi. Results showed a significant reduction in cutaneous leishmaniasis incidence in the intervention village from 4.78% to 0.37%. The protective efficacy rate of LLIN was 92.2%. In contrast, incidence rates increased in the control village from 3.67% to 4.69%. We also evaluated residual insecticide levels of used nets after six and 12 months of usage. It was determined that the nets had retained full insecticidal strength. These results highlight the value of real‐world data on bed net effectiveness and longevity to guide decisions regarding sand fly control strategies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first field study to evaluate Olyset® Plus efficacy in a hyperendemic cutaneous leishmaniasis area.     

On the double social life of failure

What might it mean to follow failure ‘out into the world’ (Alexander, introduction to this volume) in a way that is attentive both to its contingent and diffuse effects, and to the work involved in making it socially legible? This essay follows a moment of social breakdown, its reverberations in social life, and the forms of diagnosis it elicited as a way of exploring the double social life of failure. Focusing on the aftermath of Kyrgyzstan's 2010 ‘Osh events’ (Oshskie sobytiia) as they took hold in a multi-tenant and ethnically mixed dormitory apartment for migrant workers in Moscow, I follow failure forwards, exploring how a period of intercommunal violence reverberated in a context of protracted work migration, legal non-recognition, and the digital circulation of blame. I also track it backwards, attending to my interlocutors’ practices of diagnosis and excavation. Among Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Moscow, the Osh events figured as indexical of different kinds of failure – whether of protection, recognition, or proper state care. I take vernacular diagnoses of bardak – normative breakdown – as an ethnographic entry point for thinking about the spatial and temporal afterlives of violence, their articulation in an age of digital mediation, and the ethics of naming and diagnosing failure.