The Altyerre Story—‘Suffering Badly by Translation’

In culture‐contact situations, it is commonplace for words to be borrowed from other unrelated vernaculars, for their pronunciations to be changed, and their meanings modified to fit new contexts. The Arandic word altyerre is a rather extreme example of this, and at the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘translation’ of the related word Alcheringa as ‘dream‐times’ sparked a debate that, in some forms, continues to this day. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons why this particular word struck such a controversial chord. I give an updated semantic perspective on the word altyerre , drawing on evidence from Arandic languages and from other languages in Central Australia. Then I examine some of the consequences of both religious and secular interpretations of altyerre and show how the popularisation of this word and its translations has impacted on its meanings in current usage.     

Between Relativism and Imperialism: Navigating Moral Diversity in Cross‐Cultural Bioethics

The need for explicit theoretical reflection on cross‐cultural bioethics continues to grow as the spread of communication technologies and increased human migration has made interactions between medical professionals and patients from different cultural backgrounds much more common. I claim that this need presents us with the following dilemma. On the one hand, we do not want to operate according to an imperialist ethical framework that denies and silences the legitimacy of cultural values other than our own. On the other hand, we do not want to backslide into a form of cultural relativism that is unable to critically appraise cultural practices that are harmful, unjust, or oppressive. I examine two prominent attempts – the principlism of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress and the Contractarianism of Robert Baker – to frame cross‐cultural bioethics between these two extremes and argue that both approaches have significant flaws. The principlist approach fails to provide a non‐question begging way to identify cross‐cultural norms that does not already assume the universal legitimacy of moral principles dominant in North American society. Baker's contractarianism cannot grapple with the realities of political power imbalances that often characterize cross‐cultural moral disputes. I suggest that a naturalized feminist framework, though not free of its own theoretical difficulties, provides the best alternative for approaching moral diversity respectfully and critically.     

‘There are no chickens in suicide vests’: the decoupling of human rights and animal rights in Israel

In this article, I consider the shifting politics of animal rights activism in Israel in relation to human rights activism. I find that whereas in the past, human and animal rights activism were tightly linked, today they have become decoupled, for reasons I explore in this article. Although human and animal rights activism once shared social and ideological foundations in Israeli society, today much of the current animal rights activism is assertive and explicit in its disregard for human rights issues, such as the ongoing occupation of Palestine and the treatment of Palestinians. This decoupling has been heightened by the appropriation of animal rights politics by a right‐wing state for the purposes of ethical legitimation. This article considers the dilemmas of ethical responsibilities towards humans and animals as it plays out in one of the most vexed political environments in the world. I consider the shifting politics of human and animal rights activism, and demonstrate how they implicate and entangle each other in the context of the ongoing Israeli‐Palestinian conflict. I further consider what the decoupling of the human and animal rights movements might suggest regarding the ongoing academic critique of human rights and humanism.     

The Ethics of Continued Life‐Sustaining Treatment for those Diagnosed as Brain‐dead

Given the long‐standing controversy about whether the brain‐dead should be considered alive in an irreversible coma or dead despite displaying apparent signs of life, the ethical and policy issues posed when family members insist on continued treatment are not as simple as commentators have claimed. In this article, we consider the kind of policy that should be adopted to manage a family's insistence that their brain‐dead loved one continues to receive supportive care. We argue that while it would be ethically inappropriate to continue to devote scarce acute care resources to such patients in a hospital setting, it may not be ethically inappropriate for patients to receive these resources in certain other settings. Thus, if a family insists on continuing to care for their brain‐dead loved at their home, we should not, from a policy perspective, interfere with the family's wishes. We also argue that healthcare professionals should make some effort to facilitate the transfer of brain‐dead patients to these other settings when families insist on continued treatment despite being informed about the lack of any potential for recovery of consciousness. Our arguments are strengthened by the fact that patients in a persistent vegetative state, who, when correctly diagnosed, also have no potential for recovery of consciousness, are routinely transferred from hospitals to nursing homes or long‐term care facilities where they continue to be ventilated, tube fed and to receive other supportive care. We also briefly explore the question of who should be responsible for the costs of such treatment at the long‐term care facility.     

Textual self‐authorization

This article examines some of the pragmatic strategies by which certain texts render themselves and are rendered so authoritative as to legitimate representations of reality and the stolidity of the reality that lies behind them. My primary focus is on what I call indexical dramas (i.e. the pragmatic and meta‐pragmatic play) that support such self‐arrogating texts, particularly Scripture, as read by American Fundamentalists, and, to a lesser extent, the American Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. I argue that performatives and their uptake, including self‐arrogation, are dramatic events and that the attention given to their denouement – the performative utterance itself — masks the complex, at times contradictory, play of indexicals that constitute, or at least highlight, the very felicity conditions on which their success depends. In other words, the fragility of performatives is deflected by their denouement. Some of the defensive strategies that mask the fragility of textual self‐arrogation are: the establishment of the authority of the author of the performative; legitimation of sources of textual cohesiveness and hermeneutic practices; citationalism; its temporality; and perlocutionary effacement – the forgetting or ignoring, except in moments of crisis, of the fragility of performative acts and their uptake. I ask whether that forgetting enhances the illocutionary force of the target text over its history. I further suggest that Fundamentalists’ insistence on making their lives as biblical as possible gives performative force to their reading of Scripture.     

To see that which cannot be seen: ontological differences and public health policies in Southern Chile

In this article, I explore different visual practices performed by Pehuenche Indigenous healers and state public health professionals in Southern Chile. While non‐Indigenous health workers seek to make ‘traditional’ Pehuenche healing visible within or alongside their own ‘modern’ practices, Pehuenche people are concerned with making visible the evil spirits whose ‘eating’ of persons produces illness. Focusing in particular on different healing practices triggered by the existence of Pehuenche spiritual illnesses that are ‘seen’ by both Indigenous healers and state professionals, this article discusses how different ontologies ground differences between the Indigenous healers and what they ‘see’; as well as how a broader and substantive binary between Pehuenche and non‐Pehuenche realities goes above and beyond these multiplicities. By exploring and discussing the endurance of Pehuenche cosmo‐political relations in a world inhabited by visible and invisible eaters, I hope to create awareness about how a failure to recognize these different realities limits current multicultural policies in Southern Chile, and Indigenous health policies more broadly. At a more theoretical level, the following ethnographic account sheds light on unresolved tensions between the ways ontological difference has been conceptualized within the so‐called ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology and within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).     

Neoliberal restructuring and multicultural legacies: the experiences of a mid-level actor in recognizing difference

In this article, I address the impact of neoliberalism and the attendant techniques of financialization on multiculturalism in Canada through ethnographic research at a non-profit, multicultural heritage institution. I consider how the workers at this non-profit maintained their solidaristic, pre-neoliberal conception of multiculturalism even as they experimented with a sociality dominated by market exchange. Even as worker subjectivity was transformed at the institution by dramatic budget cuts and the necessity for project-based contracts, ‘volunteerism’, entrepreneurialism, and flexibility, neoliberal discourse also opened new imaginative possibilities for the MHSO. Through extensive community networks the organization has been able to survive, if precariously, without dramatic changes to its pre-neoliberal programming which asserts a social democratic, pluralist ethos. Therefore, I argue in this article that we need to attend to the limits of neoliberal effects on the situated and historically distinctive way multiculturalism has been put into practice around the world.     

Multiple nostalgias: the fabric of heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR)

This article explores the workings of nostalgia as a major driving force in heritage‐making. Based on my fieldwork in Luang Prabang, an ancient royal town of northern Laos which became a UNESCO Listed World Heritage Site in 1995, I propose that it is necessary to disentangle the multiple nostalgic attachments which lie behind the often‐mentioned label ‘nostalgia’ from those which are not necessarily nostalgic. I explore the various engagements of diverse actors with nostalgia, and how these engagements, rooted in personal experiences, intersect with specific postures towards time, history, heritage, development, and culture. Secondly, my aim is to highlight the performative aspects of nostalgia in the fabric of heritage. I argue that, by attempting to preserve spaces, practices, and objects, UNESCO experts and national civil servants effectively transform them. Far from stopping transmission and culture mechanisms, patrimonial recognition creates aesthetic forms, historical narratives, politics of transmission, and, more generally, social configurations. I delve into the processes through which Luang Prabang has been turned into a heritage scene and a tourist attraction, and I contend that such transformation is rendered possible by the concatenation of UNESCO projects, cosmopolitan gentrification, tourism development, and state programmes.     

Pro‐Life Arguments Against Infanticide and Why they are Not Convincing

Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva's controversial article ‘After‐Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?’ has received a lot of criticism since its publishing. Part of the recent criticism has been made by pro‐life philosopher Christopher Kaczor, who argues against infanticide in his updated book ‘Ethics of Abortion’. Kaczor makes four arguments to show where Giubilini and Minerva's argument for permitting infanticide goes wrong. In this article I argue that Kaczor's arguments, and some similar arguments presented by other philosophers, are mistaken and cannot show Giubilini and Minerva's view to be flawed. I claim that if one wants to reject the permissibility of infanticide, one must find better arguments for doing so.     

‘Deep engagement’ and disengaged reason

In this paper, I explore what it would mean to pursue modes of ‘deeper engagement’ and how this might be done without abandoning the capacity for disengaged reasoning. Charles Taylor recognises disengaged reasoning as ‘one of the most important developments of the modern era’ and as essential to the pursuit of the good society, even though (like everything else) when taken to an extreme it corrupts or distorts the modes of being‐in‐the‐world. In A Secular Age, Taylor continues a long‐running critique of disengaged reason and its contributions to the malaise of modernity, focusing especially on its conflictual relationship with religious belief and its central role in the disenchantment of the world. My objective here is to relativise and contextualise the relationship between disengaged and engaged modes of being, in part by exploring some of the ways in which we may be deeply engaged in the world and with one another while also employing the critical faculties that enable us to analyse dispassionately, amongst other things, theistic and other interpretations of being‐in‐the‐world.     

A white side of black Britain: The concept of racial literacy

Opposition to transracial adoption on both sides of the Atlantic, has been based, in part, on the assumption that white parents cannot understand race or racism and thus cannot properly prepare children of multiracial heritage to cope with racism. In this article I draw on a seven-year ethnographic study to offer an intensive case study of white transracial birth parents that counters this racial logic. I draw on a subset of data collected from field research and in-depth interviews with 102 members of black-white interracial families in England. I provide an analysis of three practices that I discovered among white transracial birth parents who were attempting to cultivate ‘black’ identities in their children of multiracial heritage. I offer the concept of ‘racial literacy’ to theorize their parental labour as a type of anti-racist project that remains under the radar of conventional sociological analyses of racism and anti-racist social movements.     

Reshaping Conflict through School Ceremonial Events in Israeli Palestinian–Jewish Coeducation

This article on the joint Hanukkah/Id'l Fitter/Christmas celebration examines Arab-Jewish coeducation aimed at encouraging each group to take pride in their cultural heritage while experiencing and respecting the heritage of the other. The study is an attempt to better understand the ways in which bilingual/multicultural efforts can shape individual and group perspectives and help overcome intergroup tensions and conflict, inquiring into the potential of ritual events to support this endeavor. The article aims to assist teacher educators in (redesigning new or existing multicultural education programs for conflict-ridden areas, and to illuminate the dynamic interaction between the declared expectations of those programs and the conflictual contexts that constrain them.     

Truncation Error Estimates in Process Life Cycle Assessment Using Input‐Output Analysis

Process life cycle assessment (PLCA) is widely used to quantify environmental flows associated with the manufacturing of products and other processes. As PLCA always depends on defining a system boundary, its application involves truncation errors. Different methods of estimating truncation errors are proposed in the literature; most of these are based on artificially constructed system complete counterfactuals. In this article, we review the literature on truncation errors and their estimates and systematically explore factors that influence truncation error estimates. We classify estimation approaches, together with underlying factors influencing estimation results according to where in the estimation procedure they occur. By contrasting different PLCA truncation/error modeling frameworks using the same underlying input‐output (I‐O) data set and varying cut‐off criteria, we show that modeling choices can significantly influence estimates for PLCA truncation errors. In addition, we find that differences in I‐O and process inventory databases, such as missing service sector activities, can significantly affect estimates of PLCA truncation errors. Our results expose the challenges related to explicit statements on the magnitude of PLCA truncation errors. They also indicate that increasing the strictness of cut‐off criteria in PLCA has only limited influence on the resulting truncation errors. We conclude that applying an additional I‐O life cycle assessment or a path exchange hybrid life cycle assessment to identify where significant contributions are located in upstream layers could significantly reduce PLCA truncation errors.     

Reducing Anti‐Fat Prejudice in Preservice Health Students: A Randomized Trial

Anti‐fat sentiment is increasing, is prevalent in health professionals, and has health and social consequences. There is no evidence for effective obesity prejudice reduction techniques in health professionals. The present experiment sought to reduce implicit and explicit anti‐fat prejudice in preservice health students. Health promotion/public health bachelor degree program students (n = 159) were randomized to one of three tutorial conditions. One condition presented an obesity curriculum on the controllable reasons for obesity (i.e., diet/exercise). A prejudice reduction condition presented evidence on the uncontrollable reasons for obesity (i.e., genes/environment); whereas a neutral (control) curriculum focused on alcohol use in young people. Measures of implicit and explicit anti‐fat prejudice, beliefs about obese people, and dieting, were taken at baseline and postintervention. Repeated measures analyses showed decreases in two forms of implicit anti‐fat prejudice (decreases of 27 and 12%) in the genes/environment condition relative to other conditions. The diet/exercise condition showed a 27% increase in one measure of implicit anti‐fat prejudice. Reductions in explicit anti‐fat prejudice were also seen in the genes/environment condition (P = 0.006). No significant changes in beliefs about obese people or dieting control beliefs were found across conditions. The present results show that anti‐fat prejudice can be reduced or exacerbated depending on the causal information provided about obesity. The present results have implications for the training of health professionals, especially given their widespread negativity toward overweight and obesity.     

Cyprus,ethnic conflict and conflicted heritage

This article examines the dominant heritage discourse in Cyprus concerning preservation and destruction, and its implications for ethno-cultural identity construction and promotion. By exploring two heritage sites (one north and one south of the Buffer Zone) it suggests that heritage practice is more complex than commonly presented. Specifically, it shows how ethnic conflict has not only been responsible for heritage destruction but also for the preservation of it as an unintended consequence of ‘freezing’ development. It also examines how ethnic groups and individuals may come to evaluate their ‘own’ heritage negatively, specifically as an inconvenient cultural load, in efforts to develop ideologically specific or socially ‘progressive’ identities.     

Beyond the Sterility of a Distinct African Bioethics: Addressing the Conceptual Bioethics Lag in Africa

In the current debate on the future of bioethics in Africa, several authors have argued for a distinct communitarian African bioethics that can counter the dominancy of Western atomistic principlism in contemporary bioethics. In this article I examine this rather contentious argument and evaluate its validity and viability. Firstly, I trace the contextual origins of contemporary bioethics and highlight the rise and dominance of principlism. I particularly note that principlism was premised on a content‐thin notion of the common morality that is in need of enrichment. I also contend that bioethics is essentially two‐dimensional, being both conceptual and empirical, and indicate the lag in Africa with regard to conceptual bioethics. I then appeal for authentic engagement by 1) African health care professionals, 2) African health care training institutions, 3) Africa's bioethics development partners, and 4) African bioethicists and philosophers, towards addressing this critical lag. I underline the need to maintain the essential universality of bioethics as a discipline. I particularly argue against the pursuit of a distinct African bioethics, as it appears to be rooted in sterile African ethno‐philosophy. Rather, African bioethicists and philosophers would do well to elucidate the universalisability of insights from traditional African thought, for the benefit of bioethics as a whole. Thus we must engage beyond the sterility of a distinct African bioethics ‐ authentically reflecting on the essentially universal contemporary bioethical concerns ‐ to effectively articulate a viable trajectory for bioethics in Africa.     

Small but significant: Insights and new perspectives of exosomes in cardiovascular disease

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a major health problem worldwide, and health professionals are still actively seeking new and effective approaches for CVDs treatment. Presently, extracellular vesicles, particularly exosomes, have gained its popularity for CVDs treatment because of their function as messengers for inter‐ and extra‐cellular communications to promote cellular functions in cardiovascular system. However, as a newly developed field, researchers are still trying to fully understand the role of exosomes, and their mechanism in mediating cardiac repair process. Therefore, a comprehensive review of this topic can be timely and favourable. In this review, we summarized the basic biogenesis and characterization of exosomes and then further extended the focus on the circulating exosomes in cellular communication and stem cell‐derived exosomes in cardiac disease treatment. In addition, we covered interactions between the heart and other organs through exosomes, leading to the diagnostic characteristics of exosomes in CVDs. Future perspectives and limitations of exosomes in CVDs were also discussed with a special focus on exploring the potential delivery routes, targeting the injured tissue and engineering novel exosomes, as well as its potential as one novel target in the metabolism‐related puzzle.     

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)?     

THE LIMITS OF INTIMATE CITIZENSHIP: REPRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN FLEMISH‐ETHIOPIAN ‘ADOPTION CULTURES’

The concept of ‘intimate citizenship’ stresses the right of people to choose how they organize their personal lives and claim identities. Support and interest groups are seen as playing an important role in the pursuit of recognition for these intimate choices, by elaborating visible and positive cultures that invade broader public spheres. Most studies on intimate citizenship take into consideration the exclusions these groups encounter when negotiating their differences with society at large. However, much less attention is paid to the ways in which these groups internalize the surrounding ideologies, identity categories and hierarchies that pervade society and constrain their recognition as full citizens. In contrast, this paper aims to emphasize the reproduction of otherness within alternative spheres of life, and to reveal the ambiguities and complexities involved in their dialectic relationship with society at large. To address this issue, the paper focuses on the role that ‘adoption cultures’ of Flemish adoptive parents with children from Ethiopia play in the pursuit of being recognized as ‘proper’ families and full citizens. The ethnographic research among adoptive parents and adoption professionals shows a defensive discourse and action that aims at empowering against potential problems, as well as a tendency to other the adoptive child by pathologizing its non‐normativity. By showing the strong embeddedness of adoptive families' practices of familial and cultural construction in larger cultural frames of selfing and othering, characterized by biologism and nativism, one begins to understand the limits of their capacity to realize full citizenship.     

Sabar: body politics among middle‐aged migrant Pakistani women

This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle‐aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter‐generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self‐sublimation and self‐assertion in the practice of sabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.