Double Embedding Broad Thin Leaves in Paraffin

Paraffin pellets were melted in 24 × 24 × 5 mm stainless steel base molds. Specimens of leaves, 18 × 18 mm, were fixed, dehydrated and infiltrated with paraffin. Two specimens were transferred into molten paraffin on their laminar surfaces in a base mold and moved quickly onto a cold surface to cast them in a shallow block of paraffin. Each block was then scored with a razor blade, broken into two primary blocks, and trimmed to 20 × 9 mm with 5 mm flat edges. Each primary block was immersed upright on its long edge in a 22 × 22 × 20 mm Peel-A-Way® embedding mold containing molten paraffin. The leaf edge was held centrally in the mold while moving the double embedment onto a cold surface. In this secondary block, the leaf specimen stood perpendicular to the sectioning surface in perfect orientation for transverse ribbon sectioning. The two phases of paraffin bonded well.     

The Ritualisation of Abortion in Contemporary Vietnam

Induced abortion was introduced in Northern Vietnam in the 1960s as part of socialist efforts to develop and modernise Vietnamese society. With approximately two million pregnancy terminations per year, Vietnam now has the highest abortion rate in the world. This article explores how unmarried urban youths seek to cope with the experience of abortion and the suffering it entails. It is argued that while some forms of suffering are officially recognised, glorified and heroised in Vietnam, the suffering that a premarital abortion involves is surrounded by shame, stigma and denial. The ‘ethos of suffering’ that dominates Vietnamese public culture makes it difficult for youths to find resolution for the emotional turmoil and moral dilemmas that abortion experiences give rise to. In this situation, many young people turn to ritual practice, seeking help and compassion from spiritual beings and powers. Young people's reactions to abortion indicate the presence in their daily lives of spiritual orientations deriving mainly from Buddhist traditions. The paper proposes that in order to understand how reproductive events are experienced in local worlds in and beyond Vietnam, more analytical attention needs to be paid to cosmological aspects of human procreation.     

Spiritual Struggles and Interleukin-6: Assessing Potential Benefits and Potential Risks

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the relationship between spiritual struggles and levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6) with a subsample (N = 943) of participants who took part in a nationwide survey. This study, which was completed in 2014, was conducted in the United States. Spiritual struggles refer to difficulties that a person may encounter with his or her faith and include having a troubled relationship with God, encountering difficulties with religious others, and being unable to find a sense of ultimate meaning in life. Based on the notion that spiritual struggles may be associated with personal growth as well physical health problems, it was hypothesized that there is a nonlinear relationship between the two: levels of IL-6 will decline at relatively low levels of spiritual struggles, but levels of IL-6 will increase as spiritual struggles become more severe. The findings support this hypothesis and suggest there is a quadratic relationship between spiritual struggles and IL-6. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Bao-yu: A Mental Disorder or a Cultural Icon?

The embodied human subject is dynamically connected to his or her historico-sociocultural context, the soil from which a person’s psyche is nourished as multiplex meanings are absorbed and enable personal development. In each culture certain towering artistic works embody this perspective. The Dream of the Red Chamber introduces Jia Bao-yu—a scion of the prestigious Jia family—and his relationships with a large cast of characters. Bao-yu is controversial but, at the time of the family’s tragic collapse, he can be seen as embodying a spiritual struggle in which his instinct, nature, sensitivity, and creativity are grounded in his transcendent relationship with a fragment of the world stone, an eternal source of energy and creativity. We are invited to draw on a metaphysical level of thought to consider his struggles with man-made hierarchies and a situated historico-sociocultural order in such a way as to live out his spiritual being. As such, the novel is closely relevant to questions of spirituality in bioethics. Through personal experiences, passions, creativity, and relationships with others, the body is inscribed, forming the soul, which may be misconstrued (for instance, through a medical or Cartesian reformulation of events) but which can be seen as the site of ethical and spiritual thought.     

Identity and healing in three Navajo religious traditions: sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text

In this article, we elucidate how the Navajo synthetic principle sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text] (SNBH) is understood, demonstrated, and elaborated in three different Navajo healing traditions. We conducted interviews with Navajo healers and their patients affiliated with Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and Pentecostal Christianity. Their narratives provide access to cultural themes of identity and healing that invoke elements of SNBH. SNBH specifies that the conditions for health and well-being are harmony within and connection to the physical/spiritual world. Specifically, each religious healing tradition encourages affective engagement, proper family relations, an understanding of one's cultural and spiritual histories, and the use of kinship terms to establish affective bonds with one's family and with the spiritual world. People's relationships within this common behavioral environment are integral to their self-orientations, to their identities as Navajos, and to the therapeutic process. The disruption and restoration of these relationships constitute an important affective dimension in Navajo distress and healing.     

Imagination,Sensation and the Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums

This article attempts to come to terms with the phenomenology of learning in the popular Cuban spirit mediumship practice of espiritismo. Espiritistas' talents derive from the unique relationships they construct with their muertos (the protective dead), allowing them to receive, discern, and interpret valuable information for others. Learning here does not result from explicit knowledge transmission but from a guided expansion of consciousness, where the neophyte learns to attend to the particulars of the spirit world through his or her imagination and sensation. I associate this process with what Ingold has described as the ‘education of attention’, and use his concept of ‘entanglement’ to propose that learning mediumship be conceptualized as implying the development of a particular kind of person. I have further used Latour's definition of ‘acquiring a body’ as ‘learning to be affected’ to better understand the mutual constitution of the spiritual landscape and the self.     

Engaging with Lyell: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Sarawak Law and Ternate papers as reactions to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) and Charles Darwin (1809–1882) are honored as the founders of modern evolutionary biology. Accordingly, much attention has focused on their relationship, from their independent development of the principle of natural selection to the receipt by Darwin of Wallace’s essay from Ternate in the spring of 1858, and the subsequent reading of the Wallace and Darwin papers at the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858. In the events of 1858 Wallace and Darwin are typically seen as central players, with Darwin’s friends Charles Lyell (1797–1875) and Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) playing supporting roles. This narrative has resulted in an under-appreciation of a more central role for Charles Lyell as both Wallace’s inspiration and foil. The extensive anti-transmutation arguments in Lyell’s landmark Principles of Geology were taken as the definitive statement on the subject. Wallace, in his quest to solve the mystery of species origins, engaged with Lyell’s arguments in his private field notebooks in a way that is concordant with his engagement with Lyell in the 1855 and 1858 papers. I show that Lyell was the object of Wallace’s Sarawak Law and Ternate papers through a consideration of the circumstances that led Wallace to send his Ternate paper to Darwin, together with an analysis of the material that Wallace drew upon from the Principles. In this view Darwin was, ironically, intended for a supporting role in mediating Wallace’s attempted dialog with Lyell.     

Prayer,Silence, and Psychotherapy

A new interpretation of L.S. Vygotsky's “The Tragedy of Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark” and his little-known publication “Traurnye stroki-Den' 9 ava.” An essential question (object) of these texts is the secret of genuine human overcoming of suffering. This is also the main problem of psychotherapy. Vygotsky's answer has both psychological and religious sgnificance: the experience of a tragedy is mediated by prayer. Vygotsky's idea creates the basis for religiously oriented, “synergetic” psychotherapy where the main process will be spiritual, including prayer.     

Galactosyltransferase activity of intact neural retinal cells from the embryonic chicken

Permeability of electrotonic junctions between isolated and reaggregated Fundulus blastomeres was evaluated with a new fluorescent dye, Lucifer yellow CH. The dye is readily shown to pass between coupled cells. It does not enter from the bathing medium, nor does it move between cells via the enlarged extracellular space sometimes seen between them. Thus, we conclude that passage is via a private pathway, presumably provided by the gap junctions described for this tissue. In contrast to previous findings, fluorescein (as the sodium salt, uranine) also passes between coupled Fundulus cells. Although it can enter from the bathing medium, it may be less concentrated in the space between a cell pair than in the uninjected cell. Again, passage via gap junctions is indicated. Molecular models demonstrate that Lucifer yellow and fluorescein are similar in size. Thus, similarity in ability to permeate junctional membranes is to be expected.     

David Graeber's Wunderkammer,Debt: The First 5 000 Years

Graeber’s Debt: The First 5 000 Years has generated extensive commentary in the popular press and has captured the imagination of both activists at the barricades and investment fund managers in the City of London. Everyone is captivated by his critique of the myth of primitive barter. Yet it is a puzzle that a core element of his argument—the myth of primordial debt—has been largely overlooked. This review seeks to redress this oversight and in the process to suggest that Graeber’s emphasis on violence and enslavement, while compelling, is limited by his quest for origins. Feminist anthropology taught us to set aside the question, ‘when did “it” begin’ and instead open up to other questions, beyond the limits and biases the quest for origins presupposes. One wishes Graeber had entered the wonder cabinet he constructed in this book, rather than use it to ground a teleology.     

Vine Deloria Jr. as a Philosopher of Education: An Essay of Remembrance

This essay engages the concepts of maturity, relationality, and responsibility in the writings of Vine Deloria Jr. as foundational to a Native philosophy of education. After situating Deloria and these Native philosophic concepts as a moment of difference in the colonial—modern world, I explore how these concepts of maturity, relationships, and responsibility have been discussed in his work and remain potent forces in the continuing evolution of education among Native peoples.     

Suffering, justice, and the politics of becoming

To suffer is to undergo, to bear, to endure. Suffering exists on the underside of agency; it is as important to ethics as agency. The experience of suffering is never entirely captured by the ethical, political, medical and spiritual categories in which it is represented. Perhaps an engagement with suffering can open up hidden connections between these domains. After examining John Caputo and Friedrich Nietzsche comparatively on the relation between suffering and ethics, this essay explores the relation of the politics of becoming to suffering. The politics of becoming is a paradoxical process by which a new cultural identity is drawn into being and yet is irreducible to the energies and motives that spurred its initiators to action. To exemplify and think the politics of becoming is to call into question the sufficiency of existing paradigms of morality. A critical examination of the Rawlsian model of justice brings out, for example, the insufficiency of justice to the politics of becoming. It suggests the need, first, to pursue an ethics of engagement between several parties drawing upon a variety of sources of ethical inspiration and, second, to cultivate ldcritical responsiveness to new social movements that struggle to place new identities onto the cultural register. If the latter movements sometimes modify general understandings of suffering, identity, justice and medical practice they also indicate the role cultural thinkers can play in re-examining periodically established codes of interaction between these domains.A paper presented, with commentaries, as the 1995 Roger Allan Moore Lecture at Harvard Medical School, Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, May 11, 1995.     

Ultrastructure of the tube foot sucker of a regular echinoid,Diadema antillarum Philippi,with especial reference to secretory cells

Summary Suckers of principal tube feet of a regular echinoid,Diadema antillarum, are described in an electron microscopic study. Reference is made to secretory cells and nervous elements in the sucker and their possible significance in adhesion is considered and discussed. In particular, a granule-filled secretory cell-type is described that possesses long tracts down which the granules pass to terminate on the contact edge of the sucker in secretion packets. A second cell condition is described that may represent the secretory cells in a degranulated state. The appearance and significance of mucus-producing cells in the sucker is also considered.I am indebted to ProfessorN. Millott for his help and encouragement during the course of this work, to Mr.Raynor L. Jones for his expert technical assistance, and to Dr.H. G. Vevers and the Zoological Society of London.     

A Doctor’s Testimony: Medical Neutrality and the Visibility of Palestinian Grievances in Jewish-Israeli Publics

This paper follows the testimony of Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian physician who bears witness to his experiences working, living, and suffering under Israeli rule. He presents his story as a doctor’s story, drawing on his identity as a medical professional to gain credibility and visibility and to challenge the limited legitimacy of Palestinian grievances. In this paper, I explore his testimony as a medical voice that at once recounts the suffering and loss endured by the Palestinian people and also struggles to negotiate the values associated with being a “reliable” witness. Consequently, I ethnographically examine the social life and reception of his story in Jewish-Israeli publics. In comparison with most Palestinian narratives, Abuelaish’s testimony achieved an extremely rare degree of visibility and sympathy, a phenomenon that calls out for analysis. I identify the boundaries that typically render Palestinian grievances invisible to Israeli publics and suggest how medicine’s self-proclaimed ethos of neutrality served as a channel for crossing them. Finally, I reflect on the political possibilities and limitations of medical witnessing to render suffering visible and arouse compassion toward those construed as a dangerous/enemy Other.     

Mimosine Arrests the Cell Cycle after Cells Enter S-Phase

-Mimosine (β-N-[3-hydroxy-4-pyridone]-α-aminopropionic acid)—a rare amino acid derived fromMimosaandLeucaenaplants—arrests cells reversibly late during G1 phase or at the beginning of S-phase. If mimosine were to arrest cells immediately before S-phase, it would provide a superb tool for the investigation of the initiation of DNA synthesis. Therefore, we reexamined the point of action of mimosine. Mitotic HeLa cells were released into 200 μMmimosine and grown for 10 h to block them, before the cells were permeabilized and the amino acid removed by washing them thoroughly. On addition of the appropriate triphosphates, DNA synthesis—measured by the incorporation of [³²P]dTTP—began immediately; as it is known that such permeabilized cells cannot initiate DNA synthesis but can only resume elongating previously initiated chains, mimosine must arrest after DNA synthesis has begun. Moreover, cells grown in mimosine assembled functional replication factories—detected by immunolabeling after incorporation of biotin–dUTP—that were typical of those found early during S-phase. Disappointingly, it seems that mimosine—like aphidocolin—blocks only after cells enter S-phase.     

Chimpanzee ‘folk physics’: bringing failures into focus

Differences between individuals are the raw material from which theories of the evolution and ontogeny of cognition are built. For example, when 4-year-old children pass a test requiring them to communicate the content of another''s falsely held belief, while 3-year-olds fail, we know that something must change over the course of the third year of life. In the search for what develops or evolves, the typical route is to probe the extents and limits of successful individuals'' ability. Another is to focus on those that failed, and find out what difference or lack prevented them from passing the task. Recent research in developmental psychology has harnessed individual differences to illuminate the cognitive mechanisms that emerge to enable success. We apply this approach to explaining some of the failures made by chimpanzees when using tools to solve problems. Twelve of 16 chimpanzees failed to discriminate between a complete and a broken tool when, after being set down, the ends of the broken one were aligned in front of them. There was a correlation between performance on this aligned task and another in which after being set down, the centre of both tools was covered, suggesting that the limiting factor was not the representation of connection, but memory or attention. Some chimpanzees that passed the aligned task passed a task in which the location of the broken tool was never visible but had to be inferred.     

Fixing a Match or Two: Cricket,Public Confession and Moral Regeneration

‘In a moment of stupidity and weakness I allowed Satan and the world to dictate terms to me. The moment I took my eyes off Jesus my whole world turned dark.’ With these words, the former South African cricket captain, Hansie Cronje, publicly confessed that he had been a cheat, attempted to make peace with the United Cricket Board, located his fall from grace within a peculiarly fundamentalist Christian frame of guilt and atonement, and subtly connected himself and his corruption with a set of understandings about the simultaneous rigidity and vulnerability of the moral order that have grown over the past two centuries to inform, underpin and idealise Afrikaner collective notions of self. That moral order and its vulnerabilities, I will suggest here, have framed a collective identity and a collective sense of both victimhood and entitlement, within which any act becomes acceptable and possible if it can be deemed necessary.     

An Attempt to Establish Universal Human Values—Cultural Symbols—in Individual Consciousness

From the very outset, from the moment of his birth, a human being finds himself in a cultural world. A huge, universal body of experience is accumulated and stored in life in this world. It is stored in the most varied forms: in phenomena of social consciousness: beliefs, traditions, establishments, cultural priorities, etc; in a broader variety of symbols and mythologies; in art objects and texts; and, finally, in linguistics, concepts, knowledge, and even established skills [11. P. 277], etc.     

Exploded worlds — Text as a metaphor for ethnography (and vice versa)

Conclusion There is a class of scholars who seek to write about and perpetuate the culture of all those who do not write about and perpetuate their own culture. Do these scholars write about and perpetuate their own culture?Paul Ricouer and others have put forward the text metaphor for social science production — for what we produce and the way we work with it. It is one of many metaphors that we anthropologists have available to enable us to grasp better our challenging and so often inchoate enterprise. I have expressed misgivings about this metaphor because it takes us back into a world, the academic one, where we do not really belong — with its concerns for distance, invariance, truth value — and away from a world — the variable and voluble world of discourse — where anthropology should be at work if not at home. It is also a metaphor that can beguile us into ignoring the pervasiveness of self-reference and self-replication in our (the intellectual's) creation of worlds and surely in our anthropological creation of other people's worlds. As the pronouns are the fundamental entities of the world of discourse, we have focused on what we can learn from them about the dynamics of self-reference and reference and particularly about the parlous shift from talking to persons — as with the first two persons of discourse — to talking about persons — which is to say the third or absent person of discourse. The pronouns also teach us about turn-taking. Here also one has misgivings about the text metaphor for it takes us into altogether too sui generis a world of the scholar alone with his writings and his imagined or self-created audience for those writings. It is the world of the I perpetually talking and the other perpetually listening. Anthropology in contrast works on the other side of turn-taking where we emphasize the other as an I talking and we ourselves as a you listening. In a world where the powerful military-industrial centers of things do most of the talking, it is altogether appropriate that the peripheries should have their turn through the work of anthropology. That those voices should be heard is a fundamental anthropological task.We should not pretend in the conclusion, however, that the channel for hearing those voices is absolutely clear and unimpeded by self-reference — from the insertion, as it were, of the anthropologist's own voice. We do not escape the need to negotiate these various voices. And for that reason I have placed as an epigraph to the conclusion a rephrasing for the anthropologist of Epimenides' paradox. It is a rephrasing that evokes the paradox involved in giving voice to the voices of others. but to recognize the problem at the very center of our enterprise does not justify the abandonment of that enterprise nor the admirable and unique efforts at turn-taking that characterize the calling of anthropologists.James W. Fernandez is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.     

Spirit and practical knowledge in the person of the bear among Wemindji Cree hunters

The multi-vocality of the black bear as a categoryin Cree hunting entails a melding of practical-empiricalrationality with ethicaland ‘spiritual’ understandings. On one level of attention in the hunter's world, the bear functions as a postulate in indigenous scientific ecology. It does so by assimilating the consequences of both efficiency and restraint in hunting, as hunters strive to maintain good relationships with others in the world (summarized and abstracted in the bear). At the same time, reflection on these issues via the bear as a spiritual ‘alter-’ endows hunters with profound senses of identity, value and personal meaning, so that action in the world is at once practical, social, ethical, and self-motivated. This outcome is a combination of cultural learning and life experience. As the weft of experience entwines the warp of culturally available categories, narrative is the weaver.