Ambivalent moralities of cooperation and corruption: Local explanations for (under)development on a Philippine island

Concepts of development are inevitably loaded with value judgements concerning what constitutes ‘proper’ social and economic organisation. Focusing on the cultural politics of development on Siquijor, an island in the Central Visayas region of the Philippines, this paper explores these often tacit ideals. It considers one of the key idioms Siquijodnon use in explaining how development is brought about—cooperation—and some of its locally perceived opposites—‘crab mentality’, politicking and corruption—which contain powerful moral critiques of self and society. On Siquijor, local discourses of development have it that widespread poverty in the Philippines demonstrates a failing of Filipinos to live up to supposedly universal norms of ethical socio‐economic conduct. However, I argue that attention to local norms of moral economy reveal the ambivalence underlying these notions of development, particularly in relation to the roles of individualism and reciprocity in socio‐economic organisation.     

Oxytocin,testosterone, and human social cognition

I describe an integrative social‐evolutionary model for the adaptive significance of the human oxytocinergic system. The model is based on a role for this hormone in the generation and maintenance of social familiarity and affiliation across five homologous, functionally similar, and sequentially co‐opted contexts: mothers with offspring, female and male mates, kin groups, individuals with reciprocity partners, and individuals within cooperating and competing social groups defined by culture. In each situation, oxytocin motivates, mediates and rewards the cognitive and behavioural processes that underlie the formation and dynamics of a more or less stable social group, and promotes a relationship between two or more individuals. Such relationships may be positive (eliciting neurological reward, reducing anxiety and thus indicating fitness‐enhancing effects), or negative (increasing anxiety and distress, and thus motivating attempts to alleviate a problematic, fitness‐reducing social situation). I also present evidence that testosterone exhibits opposite effects from oxytocin on diverse aspects of cognition and behaviour, most generally by favouring self‐oriented, asocial and antisocial behaviours. I apply this model for effects of oxytocin and testosterone to understanding human psychological disorders centrally involving social behaviour. Reduced oxytocin and higher testosterone levels have been associated with under‐developed social cognition, especially in autism. By contrast, some combination of oxytocin increased above normal levels, and lower testosterone, has been reported in a notable number of studies of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression, and, in some cases, higher oxytocin involves maladaptively ‘hyper‐developed’ social cognition in these conditions. This pattern of findings suggests that human social cognition and behaviour are structured, in part, by joint and opposing effects of oxytocin and testosterone, and that extremes of such joint effects partially mediate risks and phenotypes of autism and psychotic‐affective conditions. These considerations have direct implications for the development of therapies for alleviating disorders of social cognition, and for understanding how such disorders are associated with the evolution of human cognitive‐affective architecture.     

Beyond blasphemy or devotion: art,the secular,and Catholicism in Paris

In this article I explore the relationship between the secular and ‘cultural’ Catholicism in France through the lens of a contemporary art exhibit displayed at a new project of the French Catholic Church. Visitors’ varied responses to the exhibit, I argue, ultimately reinforced the organizers’ claim that the activities that occur within this ‘non‐religious’ space of the French church are self‐evident aspects of a broadly recognizable and ‘secular’ French or European culture.     

Antibiotic resistance as a tragedy of the commons: An ethical argument for a tax on antibiotic use in humans

To the extent that antibiotic resistance (ABR) is accelerated by antibiotic consumption and that it represents a serious public health emergency, it is imperative to drastically reduce antibiotic consumption, particularly in high‐income countries. I present the problem of ABR as an instance of the collective action problem known as ‘tragedy of the commons’. I propose that there is a strong ethical justification for taxing certain uses of antibiotics, namely when antibiotics are required to treat minor and self‐limiting infections, such as respiratory tract infections, in otherwise healthy individuals. Taxation would allow a reduction in consumption (given certain behavioural economics assumptions) and/or ensure that individuals internalize or compensate for their contribution to the erosion of the common good of antibiotic effectiveness. I suggest that revenue from the tax could be used to fund conservation and innovation strategies. Taxation might be a coercive policy, especially for certain individuals, but the ethical case for coercive policies is very strong when the good to be preserved is important enough and when they force individuals to do something they have a moral obligation to do anyway. I argue that, in the case of mild and self‐limiting infections, individuals have a moral duty of easy rescue and a moral duty of fairness to make their contribution to the preservation of the common good of antibiotic effectiveness by foregoing antibiotics. I also suggest that taxing antibiotics in such cases is an all things considered ethically justified policy even if it would introduce inequalities in access to healthcare.     

Becoming a Developer: Processes of Personhood in Urban Community-driven Development,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Community-driven development in Indonesia requires the recruitment of volunteers: local residents with the will to develop themselves and others. By revealing the processes of personhood in light of volunteers’ own theories of self, I aim to disrupt simple readings of subjectification in the anthropology of development. Local volunteers understand their recruitment as having the opportunity to occupy a social position that is aligned with their jiwa (nature), and their participation as satisfying their hati (seat of emotion). Rather than assess the success or failure of state actions to regulate or constitute citizens through discursive and affective means, I take seriously this understanding of development as a process of locating and recruiting people predisposed to becoming the subjects of state development. Doing so prompts new lines of enquiry that have been overlooked in understanding processes of subjectification in development: namely the reason why some people are recruited as development subject, while the majority are not.     

Anthropology in conversation with an Islamic tradition: Emmanuel Levinas and the practice of critique

As an alternative to approaching Islam as an object for anthropological analysis, this article develops the idea of an anthropologist participating in conversations going on within an Islamic tradition. The idea of a conversation is developed through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and his ideal of knowing as an ethical relation with an infinite other. Levinas opposes a sterile and oppressive relation of ‘totality’, where the knowing self encompasses the other within concepts and thought that originate in the self, with a critical and creative relation of ‘infinity’, in which the alterity of the other is maintained and invites conversation that brings the self into question. In the article, recent disciplinary discussions of how anthropology should engage with alterity, which have been framed in terms of ontology and post‐secular anthropology, are examined in the light of Levinas's ideal of knowing as ethical and critical practice.     

‘A good neighbour is not one that gives’: detachment,ethics, and the relational self in Kenya

Since Mauss, anthropologists have been drawn to gifts because they are understood to index the moral, often in contrast to the amorality of the market. Giving is considered to bring people closer together, weaving them into the fabric of sociality. However, in Korogocho, a low‐income informal settlement in Nairobi, women recognize the dangers of giving and of closeness. Not only could others be a burden on them, but they could also be a burden on others. Thus, women seek ways in which they can detach from one another. Beginning with the assumption of the relational self, I argue that this detachment is an ethical practice that can be best understood as what I term a ‘care for relationships’. In making this argument, this article aims to contribute to debates within the anthropology of ethics and morality concerning social relationships by showing the way in which relationships might be the explicit object of ethical practices.     

Troubled landscapes,troubling anthropology: co‐presence,necessity, and the making of ethnographic knowledge

If ‘co‐presence is a condition of [anthropological] inquiry’ (Fabian), what sort of knowledge does it produce? I explore this question through an ethnography of a ‘troubled landscape’ in Malaysian Borneo: a lush, hilly region that has been the site of a dam construction and resettlement project since the late 2000s. My article uses the notion of co‐presence as both a lens through which to explore the predicaments of the four small communities affected by the scheme and a reflexive device that underscores the embeddedness of the ethnographic encounter in a larger relational field – one characterized as much by chance and necessity as it is by anthropologists’ intellectual agendas. In the process, I seek to trouble some of the methodological and ethical issues posed by anthropology's recent ‘ontological turn’, notably the long‐standing questions of what it means to ‘take seriously’ and how ethnography and the ethnographer are implicated in this project.     

One family: defining kinship in the neighbourhoods of Kumasi,Ghana

This article investigates how the concept that ‘people from one place are one family’ creates an a priori category of relatedness among otherwise unrelated neighbours in Kumasi, Ghana. A connection between spatial and kinship relations is indicated in the common saying, but unlike similar connections elaborated in other locales, residents often do not share activities such as cooking or cultivating prior to making claims to being ‘one family’. Through interviews and the resolution of a neighbourhood dispute, I show that the assumption that co‐residents are family can precede – and instantiate – the practices that indicate shared family. I argue that the equivalence between place and family is a fundamentally ethical equivalence that renders the actions of selves and others evaluable according to a common understanding of what is good for communities.     

PRENATAL GENETIC TESTING KITS SOLD AT YOUR LOCAL PHARMACY: PROMOTING AUTONOMY OR PROMOTING CONFUSION?

Research groups around the world are developing non‐invasive methods of prenatal genetic diagnosis, in which foetal cells are obtained by maternal blood test. Meanwhile, an increasing number of genetic tests are sold directly to the public. I extrapolate from these developments to consider a scenario in which PNGD self‐testing kits are sold directly to the public. Given the opposition to over‐the‐counter genetic tests and the continuing controversy surrounding PNGD, it is reasonable to expect objections to PNGD self‐testing kits. I focus on one potential objection, that PNGD self‐testing kits would undermine the autonomy of potential test subjects. More specifically, that ‘direct to the public’ PNGD would fail to ensure that consumers exercise autonomy in the following PNGD‐related choices:

• ? Should I use PNGD?
• ? Based on the results of the PNGD test, should I continue or terminate my pregnancy?

Under the current system, PNGD is provided by health care practitioners, who are required to counsel women both before and after the test. In contrast, ‘direct to the public’ PNGD would allow women to make their PNGD‐related decisions outside the context of the health care system. I compare these two decision‐making contexts, arguing that the health care system is not unequivocally better at promoting the autonomy of potential test subjects. Therefore the promotion of autonomy does not constitute a strong argument against such test kits. Other objections may be more persuasive, so I do not offer an overall assessment of the acceptability of ‘direct to the public’ PNGD.     

Autoethnographic Challenges: Confronting Self,Field and Home

Anthropologists working at ‘home’ or in realms of the familiar often share a considerable sense of connection with participants. In these contexts, the researcher's potential position as an ‘insider’ offers particular opportunities for utilising self as a key resource. Through my own fieldwork at ‘home’ in Melbourne as an ‘insider’ among Bosnian migrants, I was confronted with the challenge of using my self to understand others' experiences. In this paper I discuss the autoethnographic process and consider how its application enabled me to consciously understand my own experiences and utilise my experiential self to inform my study.     

Post‐trial obligations in the Declaration of Helsinki 2013: classification,reconstruction and interpretation

The general aim of this article is to give a critical interpretation of post‐trial obligations towards individual research participants in the Declaration of Helsinki 2013. Transitioning research participants to the appropriate health care when a research study ends is a global problem. The publication of a new version of the Declaration of Helsinki is a great opportunity to discuss it. In my view, the Declaration of Helsinki 2013 identifies at least two clearly different types of post‐trial obligations, specifically, access to care after research and access to information after research. The agents entitled to receive post‐trial access are the individual participants in research studies. The Declaration identifies the sponsors, researchers and host country governments as the main agents responsible for complying with the post‐trial obligations mentioned above. To justify this interpretation of post‐trial obligations, I first introduce a classification of post‐trial obligations and illustrate its application with examples from post‐trial ethics literature. I then make a brief reconstruction of the formulations of post‐trial obligations of the Declaration of Helsinki from 2000 to 2008 to correlate the changes with some of the most salient ethical arguments. Finally I advance a critical interpretation of the latest formulation of post‐trial obligations. I defend the view that paragraph 34 of ‘Post‐trial provisions’ is an improved formulation by comparison with earlier versions, especially for identifying responsible agents and abandoning ambiguous ‘fair benefit’ language. However, I criticize the disappearance of ‘access to other appropriate care’ present in the Declaration since 2004 and the narrow scope given to obligations of access to information after research.     

For an anthropology of the demoralized: state pay,mock‐labour,and unfreedom in a Serbian firm

Recently, the leitmotif of much anthropological writing became that of the virtue of precarity: the belief that people continue to exercise their ethical imagination in the most trying circumstances. While refreshingly non‐deterministic, the Foucauldian approach to freedom that guides this vision neglects those situations in which people see their ability to be moral as irreparable, and structurally compromised. Such is the case of a Serbian firm selling spare car parts, where policies of financing unprofitable employment gradually involved workers in everyday, ritualized performances of productivity for the state – what I call mock‐labour. Unable either to meaningfully fulfil or to renounce the ethos of work, workers remain in an affective blend of nonchalance and failure, experiencing mock‐labour as both a source of material security and an abandonment of their creative capacities – a mocking of moral self. I call for a reconciliation of the anthropologies of ethics and precarity through the notion of demoralization, as a state in which the deficits of structural agency and the limits of reflective freedom overlap.     

Politics of Presence at the Urban Margins. Emplacement as a Performative Force Among Migrant-Settlers in Chile*

ABSTRACT

Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Arica, a northern Chilean city, this paper addresses the process of ‘emplacement from the margins’ as a performative force in which materialities, affective dimensions and claims are tied together. It analyses how migrants become settlers in unauthorised camps on the fringes of Arica. I argue that in this process a ‘politics of presence’ emerges, intimately imbricated in the material constitution of these settlements. I explore the potential of such politics to break the ‘sensible’ order and open the possibility for ignored actors to become present as legitimate urban interlocutors. I discuss aspects of what Kathleen Stewart describes as ‘ordinary things that matter’ because they shimmer precariously, such as the dynamic contingency derived from the building procedures commonly used in unauthorised camps.     

Self‐Euthanasia,the Dutch Experience: In Search for the Meaning of a Good Death or Eu Thanatos

My main purpose in this article is to establish the meaning of a ‘good death’ when death is self‐chosen. I will take as my point of departure the new notion of ‘self‐euthanasia’ and the corresponding practice that has evolved in the Netherlands in recent years. Both physician‐euthanasia and self‐euthanasia refer to an ideal process of a good death, the first being ultimately the physician's responsibility, while the second is definitely the responsibility of the individual choosing to die. However, if we also accept the existence of a fundamental moral difference between ending another person's life and ending your own life, and if we accept this moral difference to be also relevant to the normatively laden good death, then this difference represents a strong reason for preferring self‐euthanasia to physician‐euthanasia.     

Seen by the state: Bureaucracy,visibility and governmentality in a Papua New Guinean hospital

Drawing on ethnographic material from a government hospital in Papua New Guinea (PNG), this paper examines the relationship between power and visibility in two kinds of bureaucratic practice: hospital managers’ performance of institutional ‘transparency’ and patients’ careful management of their government health documents. In both examples, people engage with bureaucratic and biomedical technologies of visibility to entice governing actors to see and enter into a relationship with them. Against dominant Foucauldian theories of power‐vision, the article shows that, in the institutional crevices of a ‘weak state’, bureaucratic technologies operate as relational technologies that elicit affective motivations rather than as disciplinary technologies that transform the self.     

Flagellar oscillation: a commentary on proposed mechanisms

Eukaryotic flagella and cilia have a remarkably uniform internal ‘engine’ known as the ‘9+2’ axoneme. With few exceptions, the function of cilia and flagella is to beat rhythmically and set up relative motion between themselves and the liquid that surrounds them. The molecular basis of axonemal movement is understood in considerable detail, with the exception of the mechanism that provides its rhythmical or oscillatory quality. Some kind of repetitive ‘switching’ event is assumed to occur; there are several proposals regarding the nature of the ‘switch’ and how it might operate. Herein I first summarise all the factors known to influence the rate of the oscillation (the beating frequency). Many of these factors exert their effect through modulating the mean sliding velocity between the nine doublet microtubules of the axoneme, this velocity being the determinant of bend growth rate and bend propagation rate. Then I explain six proposed mechanisms for flagellar oscillation and review the evidence on which they are based. Finally, I attempt to derive an economical synthesis, drawing for preference on experimental research that has been minimally disruptive of the intricate structure of the axoneme. The ‘provisional synthesis' is that flagellar oscillation emerges from an effect of passive sliding direction on the dynein arms. Sliding in one direction facilitates force‐generating cycles and dynein‐to‐dynein synchronisation along a doublet; sliding in the other direction is inhibitory. The direction of the initial passive sliding normally oscillates because it is controlled hydrodynamically through the alternating direction of the propulsive thrust. However, in the absence of such regulation, there can be a perpetual, mechanical self‐triggering through a reversal of sliding direction due to the recoil of elastic structures that deform as a response to the prior active sliding. This provisional synthesis may be a useful basis for further examination of the problem.     

Empathy,social media,and directed altruistic living organ donation

In this article we explore some of the ethical dimensions of using social media to increase the number of living kidney donors. Social media provides a platform for changing non‐identifiable ‘statistical victims’ into ‘real people’ with whom we can identify and feel empathy: the so‐called ‘identifiable victim effect’, which prompts charitable action. We examine three approaches to promoting kidney donation using social media which could take advantages of the identifiable victim effect: (a) institutionally organized campaigns based on historical cases aimed at promoting non‐directed altruistic donation; (b) personal case‐based campaigns organized by individuals aimed at promoting themselves/or someone with whom they are in a relationship as a recipient of directed donation; (c) institutionally organized personal case‐based campaigns aimed at promoting specific recipients for directed donation. We will highlight the key ethical issues raised by these approaches, and will argue that the third option, despite raising ethical concerns, is preferable to the other two.