Livestock,nutrition, and intrahousehold resource control in Uasin Gishu district,Kenya

Increased livestock production in developing countries is seen as one way to improve world food supply. However, the impact of increased livestock production on household health and nutrition is unknown. This paper examines linkages between commercialization of livestock production and household nutrition. Linkages include income, resource allocation, food consumption, and human disease risk. Data from Uasin Gishu district, Kenya, show higher consumption of animal products for large commercialized farms, along with greater control of milk sales by men. Effects of livestock development may thus differ by gender, and may include both positive and negative impacts.     

A framework for the analysis of gender,intra-household dynamics,and livestock disease control with examples from Uasin Gishu district,Kenya

As livestock disease control programs in Africa begin to rely more upon para-professionals and livestock producers as deliverers of animal health care services, understanding the role different household members play in providing animal health care becomes increasingly important. This paper presents a framework for the analysis of gender aspects of livestock disease control based on a similar framework developed by Feldstein and Poats (1989). The utility of this framework is illustrated using household-level data collected from a district in central Kenya. Adult women and elderly men in the sample have primary responsibility for livestock care, and are therefore well placed to diagnose illness. Dipping and spraying of animals to prevent tick-borne and other diseases is the primary responsibility of adult males. Decisions regarding use of milk from the morning milking are more likely to be made by adult men. It is morning milk that is most often sold. Adult women, however, make decisions about use of evening milk, which is most often kept for household consumption. Knowledge of livestock diseases did not appear to vary significantly by gender, although some elderly men did possess extensive knowledge of indigenous disease categories and traditional remedies. The importance of recognizing gender issues in planning and implementing livestock disease control programs is discussed.     

Stress-Induced Cortisol,Mood, and Fat Distribution in Men

EPEL, ELISSA A., ANNE E. MOYER, CHLOE D. MARTIN, SUSAN MACARY, NANCY CUMMINGS, JUDITH RODIN, AND MARIELLE REBUFFE-SCRIVE. Stress-induced Cortisol, mood, and fat distribution in men. Obes Res. 1999;7:9–15. Objective : A previous study in our laboratory (Moyer et al., Obes Res. 1994;2:255-62 found that, in response to uncontrollable laboratory stress, women with a high waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) had higher Cortisol reactivity, poorer coping skills, and lower anger responses than women with low WHR. We aimed to compare high WHR men's stress responses to these women. Research Methods and Procedures : The current study examined Cortisol reactivity and psychological data of 27 healthy high WHR men exposed to the same laboratory challenges as the women from our previous study. Men's data are discussed in relation to that of the high and low WHR women. Results : Men responded to the stress with increases in both Cortisol and blood pressure. In comparison with the high and low WHR women, men had significantly higher total cortisof on the stress day. However, when comparing a sub-sample of men and women matched in WHR's, differences in Cortisol secretion were greatly diminished and no longer significant. In addition, men had higher desire for control than both high and low WHR women, and lower mood reactivity than low WHR women. Despite the lower mood reactivity of high WHR groups, the high mood reactors among the high WHR women, and to a lesser extent, men, tended to have higher Cortisol reactivity. Discussion: These results suggest that the psychological differences and greater exposure to Cortisol observed amon; the high WHR men and women may have played a role ii contributing to their greater abdominal fat depots. Discussion : These results suggest that the psychological differences and greater exposure to cortisol observed among the high WHR men and women may have played a role contributing to their greater abdominal fat depots.     

Livestock production,age, and gender among the Keiyo of Kenya

This article is based on a study of time allocation and decision making patterns among the Keiyo in three ecological zones of Elgeyo-Marakvet District, Kenya. It finds that age and gender are important factors to consider when examining livestock production among African smallholder farmers. This is especially true where males are absent from home for wage labor. In these situations women, young males between the ages of 6–15, and persons of both sexes aged 65 and over spend considerable amounts of time engaged in livestock-related activities. These women are also more actively involved in decision making concerning the marketing of milk. The results indicate that there is a definite need to consider the contributions of these other persons when efforts are being made to improve elements of the livestock sector.     

Sex,violence and nationalism

This article is a commentary on Joane Nagel’s “Masculinity and nationalism”, which discusses differing cultural conceptualizations of gender and masculinity, critically interrogating essentialist conceptualizations of maleness, and – in the most empirical and engaged section of the article – relates conceptualizations of maleness to war. This commentary elaborates on and develops Nagel’s analysis by introducing new empirical examples and through its emphasis on symbolism, metaphor and kinship imagery in portraying nations in a gendered manner. It is also pointed out that nations at peace project different gender relations to nations at war.     

Education,gender, and generational change: The transformation of dowry in village Nepal

In a small Bahun village in Gorkha district, West Nepal, in only one generation, there has been a huge shift to educating young women and including them in modernity. Ideologies of ‘gender equality’ in education that are promoted in development programs and discourse, and in Maoist rhetoric, have been powerful drivers behind this. In this paper I highlight the gender and generational dynamics of the changing relationship of women to education in Nepal. I argue that the move to educating women is not a simple one, nor is it necessarily a development success story. The importance placed on educating the younger generation, including women, is also very much tied to local Bahun culture, marriage values and status. Bahun villagers of Ludigaun place great importance on both education and marriage. When combined, I argue, education has in fact become dowry. While there have been transformations in education and other modernising processes, as well as in dowry practices, in this paper I show that they have come to maintain traditional hierarchies and to support the status making of the educated Bahun man.     

Performing ethnicity: performance,gender, body and belief in the construction and signalling of identity

It is widely accepted that the notions of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are socially constructed: they refer in other words to culturally shaped conceptions of identity that may or may not have any specific relationship to underlying genetic or visible phenotypical characteristics of the individuals or groups in question. While this has allowed manifestations of racism to be identified for what they are – malignant myths – an over-sociological conception of race and ethnicity can easily overlook other significant, and fluid, forms of identity formation and transformation. This editorial suggests some of these forms and posits ways in which they might inform thinking about race and ethnicity in fresh ways, especially drawing on recent advances in performance theory.     

The role of chronotype,gender, test anxiety,and conscientiousness in academic achievement of high school students

Previous findings have demonstrated that chronotype (morningness/intermediate/eveningness) is correlated with cognitive functions, that is, people show higher mental performance when they do a test at their preferred time of day. Empirical studies found a relationship between morningness and higher learning achievement at school and university. However, only a few of them controlled for other moderating and mediating variables. In this study, we included chronotype, gender, conscientiousness and test anxiety in a structural equation model (SEM) with grade point average (GPA) as academic achievement outcome. Participants were 158 high school students and results revealed that boys and girls differed in GPA and test anxiety significantly, with girls reporting better grades and higher test anxiety. Moreover, there was a positive correlation between conscientiousness and GPA (r = 0.17) and morningness (r = 0.29), respectively, and a negative correlation between conscientiousness and test anxiety (r = –0.22). The SEM demonstrated that gender was the strongest predictor of academic achievement. Lower test anxiety predicted higher GPA in girls but not in boys. Additionally, chronotype as moderator revealed a significant association between gender and GPA for evening types and intermediate types, while intermediate types showed a significant relationship between test anxiety and GPA. Our results suggest that gender is an essential predictor of academic achievement even stronger than low or absent test anxiety. Future studies are needed to explore how gender and chronotype act together in a longitudinal panel design and how chronotype is mediated by conscientiousness in the prediction of academic achievement.     

Transnational Marriage: Modern Imaginings,Relational Realignments,and Persistent Inequalities

ABSTRACT

In the context of shifting cultural anchors as well as unstable global economic conditions, new practices of intimacy and sexuality may become tactics in an individual's negotiation of conflicting desires and potentials. This article offers reflection on the interface between global forces, powerful transcultural narratives, and state policies, on the one hand, and local, even individual, constructions and tactics in regard to sexuality, marriage, migration, and work, on the other. The article focuses on the life trajectory of Gudiya, an ambitious young Hindu woman who started out life with little social capital and few economic resources in a dusty corner of what was then the tiny kingdom of Nepal. Gudiya's story highlights the ways in which she has engaged in relational realignments aimed at bringing her closer to the life she imagines, even as she has encountered new and persistent forms of inequality both local and transnational in scale.     

Drinking Money and Pulling Women: Mobile Phone Talk,Gender, and Agency in Vanuatu

This paper examines aspects of gendered discourse around mobile phones in Vanuatu, focusing especially on the talk of high-ranking men from the northern Raga-speaking region of Pentecost Island. Rather than being restricted to the technologies or their direct capacities alone, it is argued that the local reception of new technologies such as mobile phones should be contextualised in terms of broader dialogues of change, and should also take into account the visual and discursive expressions of culture that accompanies them, including in the form of marketing. Examination of the ‘impact’ of such new technologies should also include taking account of broader local meanings and messages that become associated with them. As the ethnography presented here suggests, while mobile phones themselves certainly provide a useful tool for furthering positive social change, such as in the empowerment of women, the meanings and narratives that surround them may by marked contrast entail more negative entrenchments of unequal relations of power.     

The Dolezal affair: race,gender, and the micropolitics of identity

ABSTRACT

This article treats the pairing of “transgender” and “transracial” in the intertwined discussion of Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal as an intellectual opportunity rather than a political provocation. I situate the Dolezal affair in the context of the massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks, which has significantly enlarged the scope for choice and self-fashioning in the domains of race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexuality. Anxieties about opportunistic, exploitative, or fraudulent identity claims have generated efforts to “police” unorthodox claims – as well as efforts to defend such claims against policing – in the name of authentic, objective, and unchosen identities. Instead of a shift from given to chosen identities, as posited by theories of reflexive modernity, we see a sharpened tension between idioms of choice, autonomy, subjectivity, and self-fashioning on the one hand and idioms of givenness, essence, objectivity, and nature on the other.     

Disability,Arthritis, and Body Weight among Adults 45 Years and Older

Objectives : To examine the association between body weight and disability among persons with and without self‐reported arthritis. Research Methods and Procedures : Data were analyzed for noninstitutionalized adults, 45 years or older, in states that participated in the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. Self‐reported BMI (kilograms per meter squared) was used to categorize participants into six BMI‐defined groups: underweight (<18.5), normal weight (18.5 to <25), overweight (25 to <30), obese, class 1 (30 to <35), obese, class 2 (35 to <40), and obese, class 3 (≥40). Results : Class 3 obesity (BMI ≥ 40) was significantly associated with disability among participants both with and without self‐reported arthritis. The adjusted odds ratio (AOR) for disability in participants with class 3 obesity was 2.75 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.22 to 3.40] among those with self‐reported arthritis and 1.77 (95% CI = 1.20 to 2.62) among those without self‐reported arthritis compared with those of normal weight (BMI 18.5 to <25). Persons with self‐reported arthritis who were obese, class 2 (BMI 35 to <40) and obese, class 1 (BMI 30 to <35) and women with self‐reported arthritis who were overweight (BMI 25 to <30) also had higher odds of disability compared with those of normal weight [AOR = 1.72 (95% CI = 1.47 to 2.00), AOR = 1.30 (95% CI = 1.17 to 1.44), and AOR = 1.18 (95% CI = 1.06 to 1.32), respectively]. Discussion : Our findings reveal that obesity is associated with disability. Preventing and controlling obesity may improve the quality of life for persons with and without self‐reported arthritis.     

Icelandic Fisher Women's Experience: Implications,Social Change,and Fisheries Policy

Icelandic women have been a part of the Icelandic fishing fleet since before the seventeenth century and continue to hold positions at all levels of the fishing industry. This appears to be different from any other group of female fishers about whom a study has been done in the industrialized world. This article examines the role of these women and how multiple factors such as social change, fisheries policy, technology, mobility, and economics – including Iceland's 2008 dramatic economic crash – are affecting these women's ability and desire to fish. This article demonstrates the importance and implications of a gendered perspective when considering the effects of fisheries policy, practice, and any potential for sustainable fisheries that includes diverse factors including communities, economics, social change, and the natural environment.     

Chikotsa--secrets, silence, and hiding: social risk and reproductive vulnerability in central Mozambique

In this article, I examine pregnancy narratives and patterns of reproductive health seeking among women of fertile age in central Mozambique. I map the interplay between gendered economic marginalization, maternal risk perceptions, and pregnancy management strategies. By interpreting my data in light of Shona illness theories, I illuminate the ways that embodied experiences of reproductive vulnerability, risk perceptions, and social inequalities are linked: women attribute the most serious maternal complications to human- or spirit-induced reproductive threats of witchcraft and sorcery. This construction of reproductive vulnerability as social threats related to material and social competition significantly influences prenatal health seeking. Data reveal the structural and cognitive gap between biomedical constructions of risk and lay social threat perceptions. Plural health care systems are strategically utilized by women seeking to minimize both social and biological harm. On-the-ground ethnography shows that maternal health initiatives must take this plurality into full and accommodative account to achieve viable improvements in reproductive care and outcomes.     

Women,mobile phones,and M16s: Contemporary New Guinea highlands warfare

This paper reports upon a series of recent developments in New Guinea highlands warfare. Building upon existing literature highlighting the deep influence of modernity within this context, we draw attention to two particular developments yet to be reported in the literature and which appear to be of special significance. Through an analysis of Aiya warfare, Southern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea, we document the direct and increasing involvement of women within warfare, as well as the important role played by mobile phones used by warriors to communicate before and during fighting. These two developments are situated in relation to broader shifts currently reshaping Melanesian sociality, namely, the ambivalent and fraught position of women within an emergent PNG society, as well as the rapid diffusion of mobile phone technology throughout the region.     

Reconstructing relationships among mortality, status, and gender at the Medieval Gilbertine Priory of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York

The varied relationships among status, gender, and mortality are complex, historically produced phenomena that shape people's lives and deaths in socially meaningful ways. Paleodemographic analysis coupled with acute sensitivity to site-specific context has the potential to move us toward a greater understanding of these experiences in the past. After considering the potential effects of migration and fertility on the age-at-death profiles of adult individuals interred at the Gilbertine Priory of St. Andrew, Fishergate, York (n = 200), it is asserted that these profiles primarily reveal expected and unexpected relationships among status, gender, and mortality in this Medieval context. Collectively, the long lives of religious-status males compared to other composite and gendered status groups suggest that they experienced a relatively comfortable existence despite periodic complaints of destitution. The postulated demographic advantage of high-status males did not materialize in the analysis, and a reevaluation of the skeletal evidence indicates that nearly 20% of these individuals died violently. Unexpectedly, moderate-status females shared a mortality profile similar to that of religious-status males and retained a demographic advantage over all other secular status groups. In contrast to the experiences of moderate-status females, low-status females had, on average, the shortest lives at St. Andrew's. This pattern is intimately linked to their restriction from crucial social and economic resources, and provides further evidence of their marginalization in York's wage-labor economy. Overall, these relationships suggest that traditional, highly stratified and gendered notions of Medieval status and mortality are not adequate for understanding the intricacies of everyday life and death at St. Andrew's.     

Pollen, Mating and Paternity in Agamospermous Angiosperms

Abstract This review article deals with the male function in agamospermous plants, which is still not fully recognized. Of particular interest are mating and paternity problems. Pollen of agamospermous donors may influence female fitness in early mating phases by contributing the recognition substances or inducing spontaneous seed development. Various interactions between the sperm cell(s) and the female gametophyte at later phases may include (1) occasional double fertilization, (2) occasional syngamy, (3) pseudogamy, and (4) hemigamy. In the first two processes the offspring are sired normally. In pseudogamy, the offspring is maternal, the male contribution being restricted to endosperm paternity. In hemigamy, male function may include induction of the egg cell development only (maternal offspring), or the induction of the egg cell development as well as independent participation of the sperm cell in the offspring development leading to the formation of chimeras. It is concluded that the sperm may be a limiting resource in at least some agamospermous plants. Possible directions of future research are briefly outlined.     

Marriage and employment patterns amongst UK-raised Indian,Pakistani, and Bangladeshi women

Discussion over marriage migration in the UK has largely focused on the South Asian groups, identified in survey data as Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi. This paper uses qualitative interviews and national Labour Force Survey data to gain some insights into how UK-born Pakistani and Bangladeshi women view marriage and, in particular, marriage to a partner from their country of origin; the extent to which UK-born Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi women and men marry partners from overseas and the key factors that influence this; and the effect on the level of economic activity for Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi women of marriage to a UK-born/raised partner versus a partner from overseas.