Contesting Art: Politics and Identity in the Modern World

Contesting Art: Politics and Identity in the Modern World. Jeremy MacClancy. ed. New York: New York University Press, 1997.254 pp.     

Contesting Agriculture: Cooperativism and Privatization in the New Eastern Germany

Contesting Agriculture: Cooperativism and Privatization in the New Eastern Germany. Hans C. Buechler and Judith-Maria Buechler. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. 354 pp.     

Contesting Patrimony: Cusco's Mystical Tourist Industry and the Politics of Incanismo

The Peruvian state's neoliberal policies include its mission to modernize Peru through international tourism and foreign investment, and tourism promoters and politicians increasingly invoke Andean mysticism and Inca patrimony (or incanismo) as a marketing strategy. This paper argues that Cusqueño citizens invoke the same representations, with competing claims of authenticity and authority, as they construct their own versions of Incanist identification in populist movements against the state and its enforcement of the global neoliberal order, as well as in their attempts to survive in the tourist economy. In Peru, criticism of the tourist industry is often grounded in incanismo and seems to take aim at the neoliberal order. However, closer analysis reveals a more complicated set of relationships between resistance and liberalism. Friction emerges not because cultural identity is being commodified or inequalities persist, but because local desires for access to the market are frustrated by state and municipal agencies.     

Sensitivity of household transmission to household contact structure and size

Objective

Study the influence of household contact structure on the spread of an influenza-like illness. Examine whether changes to in-home care giving arrangements can significantly affect the household transmission counts.

Method

We simulate two different behaviors for the symptomatic person; either s/he remains at home in contact with everyone else in the household or s/he remains at home in contact with only the primary caregiver in the household. The two different cases are referred to as full mixing and single caregiver, respectively.

Results

The results show that the household’s cumulative transmission count is lower in case of a single caregiver configuration than in the full mixing case. The household transmissions vary almost linearly with the household size in both single caregiver and full mixing cases. However the difference in household transmissions due to the difference in household structure grows with the household size especially in case of moderate flu.

Conclusions

These results suggest that details about human behavior and household structure do matter in epidemiological models. The policy of home isolation of the sick has significant effect on the household transmission count depending upon the household size.     

Contesting the natural in Japan: Moral dilemmas and technologies of dying

The paper opens with a discussion about the recognition of whole-brain death as the end of life in North America in order to perform solid organ transplants. This situation is contrasted with Japan, where, despite no financial or technological restrictions, brain death is not recognized, and transplants from brain-dead bodies cannot be performed. The Japanese cultural debate over the past twenty-five years about the brain-death problem is presented, followed by an analysis of Japanese attitudes, towards technological intervention into what is taken to be the natural domain, together with a discussion of current Japanese attitudes towards death. This debate is interpreted as one aspect of a search for moral order in contemporary Japan, revealing ambivalence about self and other, Japan and the West, and tradition and modernity.Portions of this paper were first given as the inaugural Roger Allan Moore lecture series on Values and Medicine: Ethical, Religious and Cultural Perspectives, Harvard University, May 1992.     

Righting the Wrongs: Contesting Water Property Rights in Southern Ethiopia

Resolution of disputes and investigation of institutions that have attempted to right the wrongs (some of which have persisted for centuries) regarding pastoralists’ property rights over indigenous water sources in East Africa have rarely been the subject of formal study. Using a framework of water property rights, hereafter konfi, we report on contestations over rights to the ancient tula wells in southern Ethiopia, some of which have been in operation for more than 500 years. Unlike grazing lands, which are communal resources, wells are private properties managed by corporate clan members. We reconstructed the history of contests over property rights to 64 wells and found that some contests over konfi have remained unresolved for many generations. Only a small percentage (20%) of the wells have no history of disputes over property rights. The resolution of disputes relies on the principal tenet of the non-transferability of konfi property rights, except in the case of the family of the ancestral konfi dying out. Contestants are expected to reconstruct how they lost the konfi in the first place. The Borana tend to discourage contests over wells through the long duration of investigations, as well as myths associated with false claims that appeared to result in deaths among the claimants.     

Contesting the limits of political participation: Latinos and black African migrant workers in Israel

The article addresses the significance of migrant associations and of their participatory practices as a vehicle by which migrant workers become political actors and negotiate membership in Israel. We offer a comparative analysis of black African and Latin American undocumented migrant communities to suggest the very fact that they manage to organize in autonomous associations in order to protect their interests, have the ability to mobilize support over issues of concern and raise claims before political authorities unwilling to accord them recognition, attest to the process whereby migrants become political actors and open new platforms of deliberation that enlarge de facto the limits of the Israeli public sphere. Moreover, by articulating their claims in terms of universalized themes such as "human suffering" and "human rights" migrants attempt at participating in the host society in the name of a generic category of "personhood", one that transcends state-embedded conceptions of citizenship.     

Empirical approaches to household organization

This issue of Human Ecologyis devoted to studies of household organization, originally presented at an invited session of the American Anthropological Association annual meetings in New Orleans in 1990. These papers share an empirical orientation and an interest in demographic processes and economic change, particularly in rural and non-Western societies, including !Kung foragers and Herero agro-pastoralists of Botswana, Ariaal and Rendille pastoralists of Kenya, Gainj horticulturalists of highland New Guinea, and a Euro-Caribbean populaiton of St. Barthélemy, West Indies. These papers demonstrate both the vitality of household studies and the utility of empirical approaches in understanding household formation, continuity, and adaptation to social, economic, and political change.     

Modeling rendille household herd composition

Previous analysis of Rendille household herd composition revealed a transition from camel to cattle ownership for sedentary impoverished Rendille pastoralists of northern Kenya. In an attempt to delineate determinants of livestock holdings, logistic regression analysis of 112 household herds from the Rendille settlement of Korr, Marsabit District, Kenya was undertaken. Results indicated that household wealth, measured in present livestock holdings, past drought losses, and livestock sales, formed better predictors of cattle ownership than did household characteristics pertaining to labor supply, wage earners, age-set membership, and birth order of household head. These results are discussed in light of pastoral strategies designed to minimize risk.     

The common property resource problem and the creation of limited property rights

Fish resources are generally considered common property and open to any user. This, the assumption goes, makes them susceptible to the tragedy of the commons in which selfish users are both the villains and the victims. While it is true that wild fish populations cannot readily be privatized, it hardly follows that they are completely open-access. In addition to social controls found in many traditional fishing communities, amply documented by anthropologists, many administrative controls in contemporary fisheries management also create limited property rights over fishery resources. This study focuses on Great Lakes fisheries of Ontario in Lakes Erie and St. Clair, and the kinds and diversity of limited property rights instituted in these areas: the formal and informal allocation of fishing areas, and the allocation of quantitative fishing rights (quotas), all of which serve as mechanisms to solve the common property resource problem. The Great Lakes fisheries suggest certain generalizations about the management of common property resources. The paper offers a life-cycle model of living resources use.     

Segregation of the mutator property of plasmid R46 from its ultraviolet-protecting property

Summary Plasmid R46 (an R factor conferring resistance to ampicillin, sulfonamides, streptomycin and tetracycline) reduces the bactericidal effect of UV irradiation but increases its mutagenic effect (reversion of hisG46), and raises the frequency of spontaneous reversion (mutator effect). Putative deletion mutants of R46 were obtained by transduction of the plasmid, then two successive conjugal transfers. Plasmids of five of six deletion classes, each with a different combination of drug resistance traits, retained conjugative ability and the UV-protecting, mutagenesis-enhancing and mutator effects of R46. (pKM101, used in the Ames system to enhance responsiveness to chemical mutagens, is one such mutant of R46.) Plasmids of a sixth class, represented by pKM115, conferred resistance only to streptomycin and were non-conjugative. All of several such plasmids (of independent origin) had a much stronger mutator effect than did R46, but lacked UV-protecting ability and did not enhance the mutagenic effect of UV irradiation. We infer that R46 possesses: (i) a gene, uvp, which increases capacity for error-prone repair of UV-damaged DNA, and thus causes both UV protection and enhancement of UV mutagenesis; (ii) gene(s) whose action in the absence of gene uvp greatly increases the frequency of spontaneous reversion of hisG46. A plasmid of another incompatibility group, pLS51, has UV-protecting and mutagenesis-enhancing effect but lacks the mutator property; introduction of pLS51 into a clone of hisG46 carrying a pKM115-type plasmid greatly reduced its spontaneous reversion rate, as expected if pLS51 also has a uvp gene able to modulate the mutator effect of R46-derived gene(s) in the pKM115-type plasmid.     

Leprosy reactions: the effect of gender and household contacts

Various host-related factors have been reported as relevant risk factors for leprosy reactions. To support a new hypothesis that an antigenic load in local tissues that is sufficient to trigger the immune response may come from an external supply of Mycobacterium leprae organisms, the prevalence of reactional leprosy was assessed against the number of household contacts. The number of contacts was ascertained at diagnosis in leprosy patients coming from an endemic area of Brazil. The prevalence of reactions (patients with reactions/total patients) was fitted by binomial regression and the risk difference (RD) was estimated with a semi-robust estimation of variance as a measure of effect. Five regression models were fitted. Model 1 included only the main exposure variable "number of household contacts"; model 2 included all four explanatory variables ("contacts", "fertile age", "number of skin lesions" and "bacillary index") that were found to be associated with the outcome upon univariate analysis; models 3-5 contained various combinations of three predictors. Male and female patients were analyzed separately. In females, household contacts were a significant predictor for leprosy reactions in model 1 [crude RD = 0.06; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.01; 0.12] and model 5 (RD = 0.05; CI = 0.02; 0.09), which included contacts, bacillary index and skin lesions as predictors. Other models were unsatisfactory because the joint presence of fertile age and bacillary index was a likely source of multicollinearity. No significant results were obtained for males. The likely interpretation of our findings might suggest that in female patients, leprosy reactions may be triggered by an external spreading of M. leprae by healthy carrier family members. The small number of observations is an obvious limitation of our study which requires larger confirmatory studies.     

Contact inactivation of orthopoxviruses by household disinfectants

AIMS: The aim of this study is to identify common household disinfectants that combine significant activity against the type orthopoxvirus, vaccinia virus with minimal impact in terms of potential toxicity and/or damage to household or personal items. METHODS AND RESULTS: Laboratory scale experiments assessed common disinfectants containing anionic and nonionic detergents, oxygen-based bleach, potassium peroxomonosulfate, chloroxylenol or halogenated phenols. Disinfectants were assessed for their ability to inactivate the virus on contact or after a short incubation period in the presence and absence of foetal bovine serum as a potential interferant. Significant differences were observed ranging from negligible effect of detergents to complete inactivation on contact with chloroxylenol. CONCLUSIONS: At least one chloroxylenol-based household disinfectant is available, which inactivates vaccinia virus on contact. SIGNIFICANCE AND IMPACT OF THE STUDY: In the event of a release or major outbreak of a pathogenic orthopoxvirus there is likely to be significant public demand for disinfectants with activity against these viruses. The identification of common household disinfectants with such activity obviates any requirement to stockpile or distribute laboratory/industrial disinfectants for this purpose.