Women,Productive Roles,and Monetisation of the ‘Service Mode’ in Aboriginal Australia: Perspectives from Katherine,Northern Territory

Anthropological discussions of the creation of social value have tended to be exchange- and object-centered. Recently, however, some Australianists have been trying to develop ethnographically more appropriate formulations of ‘value’ among Australian Aboriginal people. This paper suggests that part of what is required is a critical and comparative perspective on the status of valued ‘things’ compared to other forms of value. It suggests a ‘service’ framework for understanding value in certain Australian Aboriginal contexts (see Sansom 1988), one in which being for, doing and giving are valued as ‘help’. There follows examination of aspects of this ‘service’ mode among Aboriginal people of the town camps of Katherine in the Northern Territory; of its transformation over the long term, following these people's recent, definitive entry into a welfare-based cash economy, and implications of this transformation especially for women.     

Cosmopolitanism and the global economy: notes from China's knowledge factories

In Dalian Software Park, China's centre for IT-enabled outsourcing and offshore services, knowledge workers find themselves on the ‘assembly line’ of information processing, carrying out highly routinized, de-skilled, and poorly paid work for which they are vastly overqualified. Following the recent attention to culture and personhood in studies of global capitalism, I argue that these knowledge workers are motivated by two forms of cosmopolitanism: corporate cosmopolitanism, the capacity to reconcile the supra-territorial values of ‘global’ corporate culture with local values; and nationalist cosmopolitanism, whereby individual workers see the performance of cultural openness as a way of contributing to China's national project of modernization. As well as providing a rare account of cosmopolitanism in the workplace, this article demonstrates the significance of cosmopolitanism for the global economy. The pursuit of cosmopolitanism creates a productive friction between individual projects of self-making, corporate projects of disciplining labour, as well as national projects of pursuing modernity and development.     

The point of no return: Up to what point should we be allowed to withdraw consent to the storage and use of embryos and gametes?

This article discusses when it is ethically acceptable to withdraw consent for the storage and use of embryos and gametes. Currently, the law in the UK states that consent to use of a gamete or embryo can be withdrawn up to the point of the embryo's transfer to the recipient's uterus or when the gamete is used in providing treatment services; that is, the ‘point of no return’. In this article, we will consider other points of no return and argue that having a single point of no return, a one size fits all form of consent can, in some cases, lead to restrictions on individuals’ autonomy and cause particular types of harm. Therefore, having different points of no return that fit different circumstances could extend autonomy and allow people to enter into agreements that are tailored more to their own particular needs and circumstances.     

Unemployment,deindustrialization, and ‘community economy’ in eastern Germany

Drawing from an evening of fieldwork at an eastern German Protestant churchin the rapidly deindustrialized city of Leipzig, this article finalyzes a discussion among church leaders, former ‘dissidents,’ and unemployed workers on the subject of ‘community economy’ (Gemeinschaftsökonomie), a concept people interpret to represent a potential solution to the crisis of mass unemployment. Such local debates on unemployment offer a frame for understanding the re-negotiation of labor and social welfare in eastern Germany following socialism's end. finalyzing this discussion within the context of theoretical debates on ‘civil society,’ I follow Burawoy's and Gramsci's lead in fillustrating that the imagined economic sphere of ‘community economy’ is an ideological battle ground, where hegemonic discourse supporting economic neoliberalism may be either reinforced or subverted.     

The artist Carl Abrahams and the cosmopolitan work of centring and peripheralizing the self⋆

The article looks at the work and life of Jamaican artist and ‘citizen of the world’ Carl Abrahams. Responding to Gell's argument that art should be thought of as a ‘technology of enchantment’, and to a wider approach that seeks to explain art by reference to cultural context, the article takes Abrahams's own Weltkenntnis, or world‐knowledge, as its focus. The Weltkenntnis of an artist, or indeed any person, is often at odds both with their surrounding cultural situation and the technical means they have to express themselves. It is never entirely possible to reduce a particular form of self‐expression either to the wider worldview or to a particular set of technical effects. The article explores the conceptual tensions involved in Abrahams's claims to be a cosmopolitan artist and his work of centring and peripheralizing himself in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica.     

Asocial memories, ‘poisonous knowledge’, and haunting in Mongolia

This article argues that memories that come from contexts that are adversarial, and that are not always based on communication and sociality, should be better integrated within the existing theories of social memory. Shamans in postsocialist Mongolia claim that previously suppressed origin spirits demand that their descendants become initiated as shamans in exchange for ceasing to harass them for forgetting and abandonment. Some clients refuse to become initiated as shamans and thus choose to sever their relationship with their past. In this article I explore one such refusal, which led to a disintegration of existing social ties, while also yielding unexpected memories. These memories are different from the shared memories that emerge in the context of organized shamanic rituals. Circulated through rumour and supposition instead of positive sociality and sharing, these ‘asocial’ memories also act as a particular kind of ‘poisonous knowledge’, prompting each individual to withdraw from the network as a way of avoiding the alleged harm from unattended spirits. Owing to divergent subject positioning, where one person's remembering is another's forgetting, the haunting by unwanted memories continues, as resolution through unifying communal ritual is not possible.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

What is a node?

Biogeographic nodes can be characterized as sites of biological endemism, high diversity, distribution boundaries, anomalous absences, disjunct populations, taxonomic incongruence, parallelism and altitudinal anomalies. Their interpretation has depended on the evolutionary model used, in particular the mode of speciation: Croizat's vicariance or Mayr's ‘peripatric’ or ‘founder dispersal’ (=Darwin's ‘chance dispersal’, Hennig's ‘speciation by colonization’). All authors agree that the first process, together with movement of individual organisms and diaspores, occurs, but the second is much more controversial, with panbiogeographers and many geneticists denying its importance. Although nodes have often been interpreted as centres of origin – as in refugium theory – this is not accepted here as it fails to account for their constituting both centres and margins of distribution as well as zones of absence. Instead they are interpreted as sites of vicariance related to different kinds of tectonic activity which have been shown to occur in the same locality, such as terrane accretion, subduction, regional metamorphism, granitization, volcanism, faulting, folding, uplift, subsidence and regression of epicontinental seas. It is concluded that the identification of nodes is a more productive approach to biogeographic analysis than dividing a study area into ‘biogeographic regions’, which are usually based firmly on current geography and represent geological and biogeographic composites.     

Context-dependent model-based biases in cultural transmission: children's imitation is affected by model age over model knowledge state

Many animals, including humans, acquire information through social learning. Although such information can be acquired easily, its potential unreliability means it should not be used indiscriminately. Cultural ‘transmission biases’ may allow individuals to weigh their reliance on social information according to a model's characteristics. In one of the first studies to juxtapose two model-based biases, we investigated whether the age and knowledge state of a model affected the fidelity of children's copying. Eighty-five 5-year-old children watched a video demonstration of either an adult or child, who had professed either knowledge or ignorance regarding a tool-use task, extracting a reward from that task using both causally relevant and irrelevant actions. Relevant actions were imitated faithfully by children regardless of the model's characteristics, but children who observed an adult reproduced more irrelevant actions than those who observed a child. The professed knowledge state of the model showed a weaker effect on imitation of irrelevant actions. Overall, children favored the use of a ‘copy adults’ bias over a ‘copy task-knowledgeable individual’ bias, even though the latter could potentially have provided more reliable information. The use of such social learning strategies has significant implications for understanding the phenomenon of imitation of irrelevant actions (overimitation), instances of maladaptive information cascades, and cumulative culture.     

100 years of Haldane's rule

Haldane's rule is one of the ‘two rules of speciation’. It states that if one sex is ‘absent, rare or sterile’ in a hybrid population, then that sex will be heterogametic. Since Haldane first made this observation, 100 years have passed and still questions arise over how many independent examples exist and what the underlying causes of Haldane's rule are. This review aims to examine research that has occurred over the last century. It seeks to do so by discussing possible causes of Haldane's rule, as well as gaps in the research of these causes that could be readily addressed today. After 100 years of research, it can be concluded that Haldane's rule is a complicated one, and much current knowledge has been accrued by studying the model organisms of speciation. This has led to the primacy of dominance theory and faster-male theory as explanations for Haldane's rule. However, some of the most interesting findings of the 21st century with regard to Haldane's rule have involved investigating a wider range of taxa emphasizing the need to continue using comparative methods, including ever more taxa as new cases are discovered.     

Templates and exclusions: victim centrism in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools

In this article I use an ethnographic approach to consider the causes and consequences of a focus on ‘survivor’ experience in Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian residential schools. In this Truth Commission, the interconnected concepts of ‘survivor’, ‘cultural genocide’, ‘trauma’, and ‘healing’ became reference points for much of the testimony that was presented and the ways the schools were represented. Canada's Truth Commission thus offers an example of the consequences of ‘victim centrism’, including the ways that ‘truth‐telling’ can be influenced by the affirmation of particular survivor experiences and the wider goal of reforming the dominant historical narrative of the state through public education. Canada's TRC was limited by its mandate to a particular kind of institution and scope of collective harm. It was at the same time active in its creation of narrative templates, which guided the expression of traumatic personal experience and affirmed the category of residential school ‘survivor’ as the focal point for understanding policy‐driven loss of language, tradition, and political integrity.     

Procreation,Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.     

Testing a novel agri‐environment scheme based on the ecology of the target species,Montagu's Harrier Circus pygargus

Farmland birds are in steep decline and agri‐environment schemes (AES) to counteract these biodiversity losses are expensive and inefficient. Here we test a novel AES, ‘Birdfields’, designed using detailed ecological knowledge of the target species, Montagu's Harrier Circus pygargus. Current AES, such as field margins, that aim to improve foraging conditions (i.e. vole densities) for harriers are inefficient, as prey are difficult to capture in tall set‐aside habitat. ‘Birdfields’ combines strips of set‐aside to boost vole numbers and strips of alfalfa, as voles are accessible after alfalfa has been harvested. We found that vole numbers were generally highest in set‐aside. Montagu's Harriers fitted with GPS‐loggers used ‘Birdfields’ intensively after mowing, preferring mown to unmown strips. Thus, prey availability appeared more important than prey abundance. Thus, ‘Birdfields’, as a targeted AES for Montagu's Harriers, is more effective than previous AES due to increased prey accessibility. An additional advantage of ‘Birdfields’ is that it is considerably cheaper, due to the harvest of alfalfa. We advocate that AES should always include monitoring and research activities, aiming at a more adaptive conservation approach.     

Ethnicity, ‘status groups’ and racialization: A contribution to a debate on national identity in Britain

This paper is an intervention in a debate on national identity between ­Kenneth Smith on the one hand, and Tariq Modood, Richard Berthoud and James Nazroo, on the other, which had its origins in the influential study, Ethnic Minorities in Britain written in 1997 by Modood, Berthoud and Nazroo, and also Jane Lakey, Patten Smith, Satnam Virdee and Sharon Beishon. I pay particular attention to Smith’s insistence on ethnic self-­selection; his critical observations on the concept of ‘ethnicity’; and his advocacy of its replacement with the Weberian concept of ‘status groups.’ It is argued first of all, that self-selection should be pre-eminent; second that, in racialized societies, ‘ethnicity’ needs to be retained as a defining category; and third that the Marxist-derived concept of ‘racialization’ is more useful than ‘status groups’ as a way of understanding racism, both historically and in the present.     

Under the Law of God: mimesis and mimetic discipleship among Jewish‐affinity Christians

Messianic Judaism, a network of congregations that incorporate Jewish ritual into evangelical worship, is one branch of a fast‐growing trend among Christians globally towards ‘Jewish affinity’. Drawing on a multi‐site comparison in North America, this article examines one of Messianic Judaism's most significant internal debates: should non‐ethnically Jewish ‘gentile believers’ (GBs) obey biblical laws? It argues that GBs do not simply imitate Jews badly, as outsiders and their own leaders often believe. Rather, their actions are best characterized as mimesis in two complementary forms: mimesis of Jews and ‘mimetic discipleship’ of Jesus‐the‐Jew. Taken together, these forms offer a heuristic tool sufficiently capacious to explain both individuals’ propensity for Jewish practice and the socially specific ways it is constructed. I conclude that Jewish affinity reflects a key problem in contemporary Christianity, namely what happens when people in one religion (Christianity) come to believe that their God incarnated in the body of a man they now associate with another religion (Judaism)?     

Is New Zealand vegetation really ‘problematic’? Dansereau's puzzles revisited

Over four decades ago, Pierre Dansereau, the noted North American ecologist, proposed six features of New Zealand vegetation as being problematic or unusual in a global context. We examine his propositions in the light of current ecological knowledge to determine whether or not these can still be considered unusual characteristics of New Zealand vegetation. (1) ‘Climatic change is still progressing’ resulting in disequilibrium between species' distributions and the present climate. New data and methods of analysis now available have removed the impression that Dansereau gained of imprecise zonation, unclear vegetation/climate relations and missing vegetation types. Communities cited as having regeneration failure can now be seen as even‐aged stands that developed after major disturbance, although there are other, also non‐climatic, explanations. However, the cause of the Westland ‘Nothofagus gap’ has become more, rather than less, controversial. (2) ‘Continuity of community composition defies classification’ and ‘Very few New Zealand associations have faithful species' are correct observations, but perhaps equally true of vegetation elsewhere. Dansereau's assertion of low species richness in New Zealand is not supported by the comparative data available. (3) ‘Lack of intolerant [i.e. mid‐seral] trees …’ is not evident with newer information. The order of species in succession, seen as unclear by Dansereau, has been determined by a range of approaches, largely confirming each other. (4) ‘Discrepancies of form and function …’ in divaricate shrubs and widespread heteroblasty are still controversial, with many more explanations. Several abiotic explanations have failed to stand up to investigation. Explanations in terms of herbivory have been well supported, although the extinction of the large avian herbivores makes certainty impossible. (5) ‘Incidence of hybridization …’ remains problematic. We do not know whether the incidence is unusually high, as Dansereau alleged, but the limited comparative data available suggest not. (6) The ‘overwhelming … competing power of exotics' is strongly context dependent. They are prominent in many non‐forest habitats. It seems that they are drivers of the vegetation change in some habitats, yet passengers after disturbance in others. Invasions can be slow, and may still be very incomplete in some ecosystem types. Whether exotics will eventually take over in most communities, or whether the native species will ‘laugh them to scorn’ as Cockayne suggested, only time will tell. In conclusion, some aspects of New Zealand's vegetation seem less unusual with increased knowledge, but others remain ‘problems’.     

The philosophical basis of character coding for the inference of phylogenetic hypotheses

The coding of observations of organisms into a data matrix for the inference of phylogenetic hypotheses has suffered from a variety of problems that have precluded development of a uniform approach to the issue. Probably the most notable consequence is that the philosophical basis for coding has been prominently ignored in lieu of emphasis placed on specific coding strategies. From an epistemic standpoint, part of the problem lies with the distinction of ‘characters’ and ‘character states’, which does not accurately convey perceptual beliefs or observation statements. The ability to perceive objects is by the nature of the properties of those objects. One's sense perceptions are of characters, not states; or more appropriately, one observes objects by way of the properties perceived of those objects. The proper distinction is therefore not one of character/state, but one of object/character, as communicated by subject–predicate relations. With observation statements referring to shared similarities among organisms distributed among two or more species, and phylogenetic hypotheses in the form of cladograms serving as at least tentative explanations for those effects, then what dictates the coding of observations is not adherence to a particular coding strategy, but the need to accurately convey the causal questions that address those observations. A phylogenetic data matrix is therefore not composed of columns as ‘characters’ and cells as ‘states’. Rather, column headings indicate the observed subjects that instantiate various characters; columns represent specifiable causal questions based on observations, and cells present the subject–predicate relations of observation statements. Since data matrices must represent one's causal questions, the inclusion of outgroup taxa is justified as components of those questions. With these criteria, the coding strategies summarized by Pleijel (1995) are critiqued. It is shown that advocacy of any one of those approaches is not possible, and that strategies that incorrectly apply the notion of ‘absence’ are especially prone to misrepresent observations.     

Risk knowledge,product knowledge,and brand benefits for purchase intentions: Experiences with air purifiers against city smog in China

The present study is based on the theoretical framework of protective action decision model. This study aims to explain the relationship among the risk knowledge, product knowledge, risk perception, and brand benefits and the consumers’ purchase intentions of a specific air purifier compared with alternative brands. The research context is city smog. Results show that consumers’ risk knowledge and product knowledge significantly affect their purchase of an air purifier brand as well as play a considerable role in predicting their risk perception and in foreseeing their purchase intentions under the influence of the manufacturer's advertising strategies. Furthermore, consumers’ risk perception is a critical psychological factor that has a significantly positive influence on brand's experiential benefits, instead of functional and symbolic benefits. In particular, when comparing with brand's functional and symbolic benefits, the brand's experiential benefits is more attractive to consumers and has a stronger effect on consumers’ air purifier purchase intentions in the context of city smog.     

Max Weber in the thought of Edward Shils (1910–1995) and Ernest Gellner (1925–1995): the paradox of two Weberian approaches to the understanding of nations and nationalism?

This article traces the paradoxical impact of Weber's oeuvre on two major scholars of nationalism, Ernest Gellner and Edward Shils. Both these scholars died in 1995, leaving behind a rich corpus of writings on the nation and nationalism, much of which was inspired by Max Weber. The paradox is that although neither scholar accepted Weber's sceptical attitude to the concept of ‘nation’, they both used his other major concepts, such as ‘rationality’, ‘disenchantment’, ‘unintended consequences’, the ‘ethic of responsibility’ and ‘charisma’, in their very analyses of the nation and nationalism. And they both saw, each in his own way, the nation and nationalism as constitutive elements of modern societies. However, the paradox ceases being a paradox if one sees the integration, by Shils and Gellner, of concepts of the nation and of nationalism in the analysis of modernity, as a development of Weber's ideas.