Epidemiology and molecular characterization of hepatitis B virus in Luanda, Angola

An estimated 360 million people are infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV) worldwide. Among these, 65 million live in Africa. Despite the high levels of hepatitis B in Africa, HBV epidemiology is still poorly documented in most African countries. In this work, the epidemiological and molecular characteristics of HBV infection were evaluated among the staff, visitors and adult patients (n = 508) of a public hospital in Luanda, Angola. The overall prevalence of hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc) and hepatitis B surface antigen was 79.7% and 15.1%, respectively. HBV infection was higher in males and was more prevalent in individuals younger than 50 years old. HBV-DNA was detected in 100% of HBV "e" antigen-positive serum samples and in 49% of anti-hepatitis Be antibody-positive samples. Thirty-five out of the 40 HBV genotypes belonged to genotype E. Circulation of genotypes A (4 samples) and D (1 sample) was also observed. The present study demonstrates that HBV infection is endemic in Luanda, which has a predominance of genotype E. This genotype is only sporadically found outside of Africa and is thought to have emerged in Africa at a time when the trans-Atlantic slave trade had stopped.     

The politics of diaspora and the morality of secularism: Muslim identities and Islamic authority in Mauritius

Previous work on inter-ethnic coexistence in Mauritius has portrayed secularism as the only possible site of the national, which is at the same time described as clearly separated from religious traditions. In contrast, focusing on understandings of secularism among Mauritian Muslims in the context of a politics of diasporic 'ancestral cultures', this article analyses secularism as a field of morality which is inseparable from questions of religious reform and authenticity. The discussion of ethnographic material from Mauritius suggests that the opposition between secularity and religiosity should be treated as a productive tension rather than a liberal antinomy.     

Racial regimes,comparative politics,and the problem of judgment

This review essay examines the practice of judgment that characterized the subfield of comparative politics from its origins in openly racist ideas of the capacity for self-rule through to its twentieth-century behavioralist and positivist iterations. Though continually faced with new political phenomena that called into question its inherited criteria of judgment, comparative politics tended to practice determinative rather than reflective judgment, that is, to subsume the particulars of other cultures under known rules. Further, the essay examines the racialized conception of self-rule described by Michael Hanchard as embedded in a larger problem of Western political thinking: the flight from action into rule and tendency to think of politics wholly in terms of ruling and being ruled.     

Grief and rage: Collective emotions in the politics of peace and the politics of gender in Israel

Collective emotions of rage and grief dominate Israeli political discourses regarding the Middle East conflict. The weekly peace vigils of the Women in Black who protest the state's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the opposition which the vigils encounter, publicly display politicized collective emotions. In these weekly confrontations, grief and rage articulate intense contestations regarding the politics of peace as well as the politics of gender in Israel. Rage and grief unravel two drastically different visions of transcending national vulnerabilities and two disparate constructions of gender identity.     

Skeletal signs of activity in the Italian metal ages: Methodological and interpretative notes

In recent years anthropologists have made much progress in understanding ancient activities from skeletal remains. In this paper, material from the Iron Age cemetery at Pontecagnano (VII-IV century BC) is used to illustrate activity-related traits of eight basic categories:

Childbearing in crisis: war, migration and fertility in Angola

This study examines the short- and long-term effects of war-induced and war-unrelated migration on fertility outcomes using data from two peri-urban municipalities of Greater Luanda in Angola. In the short term, results from multi-level discrete-time logistic regression models indicate that net of other factors, war-unrelated migration is associated with a lower probability of birth than war-induced migration in a given year. Similar results are obtained when the effects of migration are lagged by a year. At the same time, the effects of war-triggered migration do not differ significantly from those of not migrating in a given year but are statistically significant when the effects of migration are lagged by a year. In the long term, the effects of migration experience on cumulative fertility are negligible and not statistically significant net of demographic and socioeconomic variables. Interpretations of the results are offered in the context of Angola and their broader implications are reflected on.     

Transnational politics and the politics of the Russian diaspora

This article sketches out a conceptual framework for exploring the diasporic politics of the Russians in the post-Soviet borderlands. Specific consideration is given to the Russians within Estonia and Latvia, the only two postSoviet states not to grant automatic citizenship to all those resident within their sovereign spaces in 1991. The essay not only examines the Russians in relation to the homeland regimes or nationalizing states in which they are located but also looks at the role of transnational political actors- specifically, the state patron (Russia) and Western transnational political institutions (notably the OSCE)- in shaping diasporic politics. It is argued that by examining the relationships among 'the ethnic patron', 'the West' and 'nationalizing state', we are better placed to understand the ways in which the differing representations of homeland by the Russian minorities themselves are being reconstituted as part of a diverse and unravelling community of identity politics, limited political opportunities and survival strategies.     

Hierarchies and causal relationships in interpretative models of the neoplastic process

The aim of this paper is to present a critical analysis of the kind of biological systems identified in the main explanatory theories of cancer (i.e. Somatic Mutation Theory and Tissue Organization Field Theory) and how references to the hierarchical organization of these biological systems are used in their explanatory arguments. I will discuss these aspects in terms of the isolation of the "locus of control" (Bechtel and Richardson 2010); that is, the point at which decisions are made shaping the explanatory endeavour. In fact, the current view of the neoplastic process, not as a static circumstance but as an evolving molecular and cellular process, makes it evident that the choice of the right level of analysis is not self-evident. This focus clarifies some epistemological reasons for the divergence between reductionist and organicist accounts and seems to suggest that the basis for distinctions among causal relationships that scientists sometimes make can be found in the hierarchical character of complex biological systems. I will argue that these different causal relationships reflect different levels of epistemic concern.     

The Road of Progress: Individualisation and Interaction Agency in Southeast Angola

ABSTRACT

In this article, I discuss the ways in which infrastructures of statecraft reverse the social purpose that they ideologically embody. I focus on the road EN140 and the village of Cusseque in Southeast Angola. EN140 was a long-sought popular aspiration, finally concretised in 2010. Since then, it has been promoted, conspicuously by the Angolan government and national media, as an instrument of extending progress, social union, and equality into rural areas. However, rather than spreading it, EN140 helps convert progress into a field of personal quests, individually privatised in rural societies. In Southeast Angola, the social ideal of progress advocated by the national politics of (re)construction is unfeasible by the effects of certain material infrastructures built in the name of such an ideal. Although it is based on a regional perspective, this article demonstrates a universal phenomenon: the role of inorganic materiality in the production of subjectivities.     

Insights into the western Bantu dispersal: mtDNA lineage analysis in Angola

Africa is the homeland of humankind and it is known to harbour the highest levels of human genetic diversity. However, many continental regions, especially in the sub-Saharan side, still remain largely uncharacterized (i.e. southwest and central Africa). Here, we examine the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation in a sample from Angola. The two mtDNA hypervariable segments as well as the 9-bp tandem repeat on the COII/tRNA^lys intergenic region have allowed us to allocate mtDNAs to common African haplogroups. Angola lies in the southern end of the putative western branch of the Bantu expansion, where it met the local Khoisan populations. Angolan mtDNA lineages show basically a Bantu substrate with no traces of Khoisan lineages. Roughly, more than half of the southwestern mtDNA pool can be assigned to west Africa, ~25% to central Africa and a significant 16% to east Africa, which points to the western gene pool having contributed most to the mtDNA lineages in Angola. We have also detected signals of extensive gene flow from southeast Africa. Our results suggest that eastern and western Bantu expansion routes were not independent from each other, and were connected south of the rainforest and along the southern African savannah. In agreement with historical documentation, the analysis also showed that the Angola mtDNA genetic pool shows affinities with the African lineages from Brazil, the main American destination of the slaves from Angola, although not all lineages in Brazil can be accounted for by the Angolan mtDNA pool.     

Fear of the dark: substrate preference in Amazonian tadpoles

acta ethologica - Due to the importance of camouflage to avoid detection by predators, predation pressure can cause coupled evolution of skin colour and preference for substrate colour. Individuals...     

Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan

Taming Oblivion: Aging Bodies and the Fear of Senility in Japan. John W. Traphagan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. 225 pp.     

DNA-led rediscovery of the giant sable antelope in Angola

The giant sable antelope (Hippotragus niger variani), unique to Angola, was feared extinct after almost three decades of civil war. Comparisons of mitochondrial DNA sequences derived from dung samples recently collected in the field and from old museum specimens of certain provenance provide the first documented evidence to date that this enigmatic antelope has survived. Its DNA-led rediscovery in the former combat zone was subsequently confirmed by photographic evidence. The Angolan isolate constitutes a distinct monophyletic group that shows a dramatic population decline from historic levels. It represents a diagnosable conservation unit which is characterised by unique cranial morphological features (Blaine 1922 1922:317–339), a highly restricted range, and the presence of fixed genetic differences in all of its common relatives.