The weight of the self: care and compassion in Guatemalan dietary choices

The Public Health Nutrition (PHN) community categorizes dietary-related chronic illnesses as "noncommunicable," fixing these afflictions within individual bodies where they are best managed by individual choices. Yet within clinical encounters in Guatemala, nutritionists and patients treat eating and dieting as relational, transmissible practices. Patients actively seek nutritionists' care, asserting their self-care attempts have failed and they need support from others; nutritionists meanwhile develop treatment plans that situate "personal choice" as lying outside the control of a solitary individual. This article moves between international policy-pedagogy and patient-nutritionist interactions to examine forms of personhood, responsibility, and rationalities of choice present in body weight-management practices in Guatemala. Although nutrition discourses might appear to exemplify how institutional (bio)power manifests through internalized self-monitoring and preoccupation for one's own self, I argue that within the lived experiences of "nutrition-in-action," the self-body of the patient becomes broadly conceived to include the nutritionist, the family, and the broader community.     

“Traveling Pains”: Embodied Metaphors of Suffering Among Southern Sudanese Refugees in Cairo

This paper presents the results of a larger study conducted among Southern Sudanese refugees in Cairo, Egypt. "Illness talk" and body metaphors are the focus of the present work, which is based mainly on an analysis of the illness narratives of people attending a church-run medical clinic. The findings suggest that refugees use certain narrative styles in discussing their illnesses that highlight the interconnection of bodily ills and refugee-related trauma. The refugees narrated the histories of their illnesses in terms consistent and coterminous with their refugee histories, and articulated illness causes in terms of threatening assaults on their sense of self as human beings and as part of a distinct community and culture. The use of embodied metaphors to understand and cope with their current and past traumatic experiences was echoed in narratives that were nonillness related. Metaphors such as "the heart," "blood," and "body constriction" were consistently used to discuss social and cultural losses. Understanding the role that the body plays in experience and communication within a given cultural context is crucial for physicians and others assisting refugees.     

Dominance in vertebrate broods and litters

Drawing on the concepts and theory of dominance in adult vertebrates, this article categorizes the relationships of dominance between infant siblings, identifies the behavioral mechanisms that give rise to those relationships, and proposes a model to explain their evolution. Dominance relationships in avian broods can be classified according to the agonistic roles of dominants and subordinates as "aggression-submission," "aggression-resistance," "aggression-aggression," "aggression-avoidance," "rotating dominance," and "flock dominance." These relationships differ mainly in the submissiveness/pugnacity of subordinates, which is pivotal, and in the specificity/generality of the learning processes that underlie them. As in the dominance hierarchies of adult vertebrates, agonistic roles are engendered and maintained by several mechanisms, including differential fighting ability, assessment, trained winning and losing (especially in altricial species), learned individual relationships (especially in precocial species), site-specific learning, and probably group-level effects. An evolutionary framework in which the species-typical dominance relationship is determined by feeding mode, confinement, cost of subordination, and capacity for individual recognition, can be extended to mammalian litters and account for the aggression-submission and aggression-resistance observed in distinct populations of spotted hyenas and the "site-specific dominance" (teat ownership) of some pigs, felids, and hyraxes. Little is known about agonism in the litters of other mammals or broods of poikilotherms, but some species of fish and crocodilians have the potential for dominance among broodmates.     

Ethical questions concerning research on human embryos, embryonic stem cells and chimeras

Research using human embryos and embryonic stem cells is viewed as important for various reasons. Apart from questions concerning legal regulations, numerous ethical objections are raised pertaining to the use of surplus embryos from reproductive medicine as well as the creation of embryos and stem cells through cloning. In the hopes of avoiding ethical problems, alternatives have been proposed including the extraction of egg cells from "dead" embryos derived from in vitro fertilization procedures, the extraction of pluripotent stem cells from blastocysts, technologies such as "altered nuclear transfer" (ANT) and "oocyte-assisted reprogramming" (ANT-OAR) as well as parthenogenesis. Initial ethical assessments show that certain questions pertaining to such strategies have remained unanswered. Furthermore, with the help of new or more differentiated biotechnological procedures, it is possible to create chimeras and hybrids in which human and non-human cells are combined. Human-animal chimeras, in which gametes or embryonic tissue have been mixed with embryonic or adult stem cells, demonstrate a different "quality" and "degree of penetration" from those produced in previous experiments. Not only does this have consequences regarding questions of patentability, this situation also raises fundamental questions concerning the human being's self image, the concept of person, identity and species and the moral rights and duties that are connected with such concepts. There is a need for legal regulation, on the national as well as the international level.     

Using people

Debate over human embryo research often has centered around the embryo's human status, with the assumption that beings accorded full humanhood may not be used as means to an end for other humans. Britain's Warnock Committee, for example, concluded that since the early embryo was potentially, not actually, a full human being, it legitimately could be treated, albeit briefly, as a means to an end for research purposes. Coughlan discusses the "Warnock principle," which precludes the use of human beings, the broader "Pauline principle," (from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans), which forbids the doing of evil to achieve good, and the principle of double effect, which sets down the conditions under which the occasioning of evil is justifiable. He concludes that the Warnock and Pauline principles are untenable if construed as exceptionless. Anscombe questions Coughlan's understanding of the principle of double effect, and Coughlan defends his arguments.     

Ethnographic empathy and the social context of rights: “rescuing” Maasai girls from early marriage

Esther is one of many young Maasai girls in Kenya "rescued" from early marriage. Her story is conventionally portrayed (trans)nationally and locally as a struggle between conservative pastoral patriarchs and the individual right of young girls to an education. I offer an ethnographic contextualization of the underlying factors giving rise to practices of early marriage, among the Maasai in Enkop, highlighting the contemporary predicaments of pastoralism in the face of population growth, climactic instability, and land-tenure reform and the insecurities and challenges around formal education. Through the intimate portrayal of Esther's case, early marriage is situated not as a relic of tradition and malicious patriarchy but, rather, as a contemporary adaptation to livelihood insecurity. I illustrate how prevailing concepts of "tradition," "culture," "victimhood," and "collective rights" in human rights theory obscure important structural factors that give rise to early marriage and deflect attention from effective policy initiatives.     

"Showing roughness in a beautiful way": talk about love, coercion, and rape in South African youth sexual culture

Sexual violence within as well as outside sexual relationships has far-reaching public health and human rights implications and is a continuing focus of popular debate, media coverage, and research in postapartheid South Africa. Partly because it has been shown to affect individual vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, sexual violence has in recent years become framed as a global public health issue. International research efforts to document the scale of this personally and politically sensitive problem can encounter conceptual, definitional, and methodological difficulties that anthropology is well placed to assist in alleviating. This article offers an ethnographic exploration of the spectrum of practices relating to sexual coercion and rape among young people in a township in the former Transkei region of South Africa. Contextualizing meanings of sexual coercion within local youth sexual culture, the article considers two emic categories associated with sex that is "forced": ukulala ngekani: "to sleep with by force" or ukunyanzela: "to force," both usually used to describe episodes occurring within sexual partnerships; and ukudlwengula, used to describe rape by a nonpartner or stranger. The article discusses the semantic content of and differences between these two key categories, demonstrating that encounters described as "forced sex" encompass not only various forms of sexual coercion but also, particularly in the narratives of young men, instances of more consensual sex. Of importance, in turn, in defining an act as "rape" rather than as "forced sex" are the character of the relationship between the two parties and interlinked ideas relating to exchange and sexual entitlement, love, and the importance of "intention," violation, and "deserving" victimhood.     

Psychological Manifestations of the Basic Properties of the Nervous System in Work

There can be no doubt that the individual psychological distinctions among human beings and, in particular, one area of these differences — the psychological manifestations of the intensity, lability, and equilibrium of nervous processes — are manifested in one form or another in work, that activity which most completely expresses the nature of man. Therefore, study of these peculiarities is a matter of pressing importance in labor psychology. "Investigation of the individual differences among men," writes B.M. Teplov, "is one of the most important tasks of psychology. The importance of this undertaking has become particularly obvious since psychology undertook to become a science of practical value (educational and child psychology, labor psychology, pathopsychology)." (19; p. 108)     

Increases in individualistic words and phrases in American books, 1960-2008

Cultural products such as song lyrics, television shows, and books reveal cultural differences, including cultural change over time. Two studies examine changes in the use of individualistic words (Study 1) and phrases (Study 2) in the Google Books Ngram corpus of millions of books in American English. Current samples from the general population generated and rated lists of individualistic words and phrases (e.g., "unique," "personalize," "self," "all about me," "I am special," "I'm the best"). Individualistic words and phrases increased in use between 1960 and 2008, even when controlling for changes in communal words and phrases. Language in American books has become increasingly focused on the self and uniqueness in the decades since 1960.     

Emotion (or Life,the Universe,Everything)

Emotions are fundamental to human life; they define its quality and motivate action. In the past, social scientists who have studied emotions have treated them as biological, cultural or social phenomena. These approaches have tended to fall on either side of the culturally recognised division between nature and culture, and so have failed to recognise that emotions bridge this division, that they are thought of as both biological and cultural, as consisting of both physical feeling and cultural meaning. In this article, an alternative approach is presented in which emotions are treated as ecological mechanisms that operate in the relationship between an individual human being and their environment. In this approach, which draws on models of emotion proposed by William James and Antonio Damasio, emotions connect individual human beings to their surroundings and play an important role in learning. A focus on the individual as the centre of analytical attention—often referred to as ‘methodological individualism’—is a logical consequence of the ecological approach to emotion, which also has significant implications for the relationships between ecological anthropology and other branches of the discipline, and between anthropology and other disciplines. In the face of an ecological understanding of emotion, all relations, including social relations, become ecological and social anthropology melts into and is subsumed by ecological anthropology. At the same time, anthropology tends to lose its distinctiveness from biology, psychology and other disciplines by focusing on a phenomenon that is of common interest to all the human sciences.     

From dividual and individual selves to porous subjects

The distinction between understanding persons as dividuals versus individuals began to develop in the latter half of the twentieth century. Originating in Louis Dumont’s comparative work into the differences between Western and Indian subjects in the 1950s, it perhaps reached its zenith in the 1980s when Marilyn Strathern used it to differentiate between Melanesian and Western concepts of the person. By the end of the century, critique and reconceptualisation of the individual:dividual distinction was so well established in the anthropological literature that its explanatory capacity was largely negated. The aim of this paper is to attempt to clarify the different modes of personhood that the dividual:individual distinction sought to elucidate by introducing a useful distinction between the self and the human subject and further developing Charles Taylor’s distinction between porous and buffered selves.     

Moral Agency,Identity Crisis and Mental Health: An Anthropologist’s Plight and His Hmong Ritual Healing

During anthropological fieldwork, the author had a serious accident on the outskirts of a Hmong village in the highland of Laos. However, this dramatic incident turned out to be the occasion of his ritual initiation into the local village community. An analysis of narratives of the incident reveals Hmong conceptions of the anthropologist’s physical, mental and moral affliction, its causative concomitants and his ritual healing. Hmong mental health and identity are situated in a moral space of exchange relationships to significant others, challenging basic assumptions of concepts of the person widely held in psychiatry and beyond. The healing ritual transformed the author’s being from indeterminate “other,” in a life-threatening state of identity crisis, to a wholesome Hmong “self,” in a state of health and moral agency. This exemplary rite de passage highlights the affinity of ritual healing and constitution of self in a moral space. The underlying relational concept of the person is in sharp contrast to psychiatry’s concepts of the person, which are deeply shaped by values of individualism. Psychiatric services must accommodate substantial differences in the concepts of the person when treating Hmong migrants from Laos.     

The parametric, psychological, neuropsychological, and neuroanatomical properties of self and world evaluation

Background

As an individual moves from adolescence to adulthood, they need to form a new sense of self as their environment changes from a limited to a more expansive structure. During this critical stage in development the last dramatic steps of neural development occur and numerous psychiatric conditions begin to manifest. Currently, there is no measure that aids in the quantification of how the individual is adapting to, and conceptualizing their role in, these new structures. To fill this gap we created the Self and World Evaluation Expressions Test(SWEET).

Method

Sixty-five young adults (20.6 years-old), 36 with a history of drug use, completed the SWEET. A factor analysis was performed on the SWEET and the resultant factors were correlated with psychological, neuropsychological, and neuroanatomical battery that included both T1-wieghted and diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging scans.

Results

We derived four factors: Self, Social-Emotional, Financial-Intellectual, and Spirituality. While showing limited relationships to psychological and neuropsychological measures, both white matter integrity and gray matter density showed significant relationships with SWEET factors.

Conclusions

These findings suggest that while individual responses may not be indicative of psychological or cognitive processes they may relate to changes in brain structure. Several of these structures, such as the negative correlation of the affective impact of world with the dorsal anterior corpus callosum white matter integrity have been observed in psychiatric conditions (e.g., obsessive-compulsive disorder). Further longitudinal research using the SWEET may help understand the impact of dramatic shifts in self/world conceptualization and potentially link these shifts to underlying changes in brain structure.     

(Un)Necessary Toughness?: Those "Loud Black Girls" and Those "Quiet Asian Boys"

This article examines the process of identity construction and its relationship to discursive and representational acts in producing students as academic and social beings. Drawing on Judith Butler's work on gender performativity, I focus on two student populations—black females and Southeast Asian American males—and analyze the symbolic and material effects of the production of them as racialized, gendered Other through the repeated stylization of their bodies and behavior. The materialization of the students as "loud black girls" and "quiet Asian boys," however, opens up the potential for disrupting the hegemonicfbrces of regulatory norms.     

The meaning of natural childbirth

The term "natural childbirth" encompasses a variety of methods, including the Lamaze, Bradley, and home-birth approaches, which place more or less reliance on medical technology. Aristotle's analysis of three levels of human activity--digestion and reproduction, perception and locomotion, and abstract thinking--and Pellegrino and Thomasma's classification of the "living body," "lived body," and "lived self," provide a principled framework in which each of these childbirth practices can be considered natural.     

Death,taxes, public opinion,and the Midas touch of Mary Tyler Moore: accounting for promises by politicians to help avert and control diabetes

Anthropologists have begun to publish ethnographic accounts of policy-making, but few have studied medical or health matters, despite broad acceptance in anthropology that "biopower" permeates contemporary societies. This article presents some findings from an ethnographic study of how diabetes gained recognition as a pressing public health problem in Canada. It underlines the importance of statistics for constituting power within and across nation states. Statistics imbricate people and things distributed across vast distances, but they still need to be generated and invoked by individuals to engender effects--as illustrated in this article by the contributions of researchers, aboriginal leaders, and an American actress, Mary Tyler Moore--in this case, the development of Canadian government policies justified in the name of averting and controlling diabetes. To make sense of these findings, subtle differences between two concepts coined by Michel Foucault, "biopower" and "governmentality," seem significant.     

Self and other through the prism of AIDS: a literary examination of relationships with patients

This article examines how the "non-ill," often formal or informal caregivers, structure their relationships with "the ill," using as a specific example the disease of AIDS; and as a specific analytic tool selections of fictional writing. An introductory rationale explores why literature may be well-suited to helping us understand value-laden issues such as relationship. Discussion then focuses on how the professional and personal Self is identified and defined in relation to the suffering Other, through the development of concepts such as threat and boundary work. The concluding section suggests alternative relational models derived from more fluid and permeable definitions of Self and Other.     

The Meaning of Death in Northern Cheyenne Culture

Abstract

Death is a process in Northern Cheyenne culture, not an event, and the process of death reverses the process of development of the human person. Death marks the end of the association between spiritual self and physical body for human beings, but not the anihilation of the self. The Northern Cheyenne lives in a “great society” in which humans are not the only kind of participant, and deceased tribal members generally retain both tribal membership and personhood. Death, here, is transformation even transmigration and only those who have sinned or who die in a bad way will forfeit their place in the tribal community. Yet even a good death brings intense loneliness to those who remain, and fear of that loneliness is the greatest fear associated with death in the Northern Cheyenne community.     

Nutritional PharmEcology: Doses, nutrients, toxins, and medicines

The synthesis of pharmacological techniques and concepts into ecology holds considerable promise for gaining new insights into old questions, uncovering new priorities for research and, ultimately, for consolidating a new sub-discipline within the ecological sciences-PharmEcology. We argue that this potential will best be realized if the boundaries of PharmEcology are drawn broadly to encompass not only toxins and medicines, but also nutrients. The hub of our argument is that PharmEcology shares with the established discipline of nutritional ecology an organismal focus, at the core of which is the notion of evolutionary function. From this functional viewpoint the dividing lines between chemicals traditionally considered as "toxins," "medicines," and "nutrients" are often thin, vague, heavily contingent and non-stationary, and thus provide a poor footing for an emerging sub-discipline. We build our argument around three points: nutrients and toxins are not so different, medicines and nutrients are not so different, and even in cases in which nutrients, medicines and toxins can be categorically distinguished, the biological actions of these compounds are heavily interdependent.     

The evolution of the human mind and logic--mathematics structures

The evolution of the human mind is discussed based on: (i) the fact that living beings interchange matter, energy and information with their environment, (ii) an ontological interpretation of the "reality" of the quantum world, of which logic-mathematics structures are considered constitutive parts, (iii) recent theories according to which living beings are considered as dynamic complex systems organized by information, and (iv) the fact that the evolution of living beings is guided by information about the environment and by intrinsic information on living systems (auto-organization). Assuming the evolution of vision as a model we observe that the driving forces that directed the evolution of the eyes, as dynamic complex systems, are the information about the environment supplied by sunlight and the intrinsic information-gaining mechanism of living organisms. Thus, there exists a convergence toward a visual system with the greatest ability to obtain light information, like the human eye, and also a divergence that leads to the development of specific qualities in some species. As in the case of vision the evolution of the human mind-brain cannot be a consequence of factors unrelated to the object of its own functioning. The human mind was structured for the acquisition from reality of the logic-mathematics structures that underlie the whole universe and consequently of an internal representation of the external world and of its own self. Thus, these structures are, together with the intrinsic capacity for auto-organization of the human brain, the predominant driving force of the human mind evolution. Both factors are complementary.