Global Health Care Justice,Delivery Doctors and Assisted Reproduction: Taking a Note From Catholic Social Teachings

This article will examine the Catholic concept of global justice within a health care framework as it relates to women's needs for delivery doctors in the developing world and women's demands for assisted reproduction in the developed world. I will first discuss justice as a theory, situating it within Catholic social teachings. The Catholic perspective on global justice in health care demands that everyone have access to basic needs before elective treatments are offered to the wealthy. After exploring specific discrepancies in global health care justice, I will point to the need for delivery doctors in the developing world to provide basic assistance to women who hazard many pregnancies as a priority before offering assisted reproduction to women in the developed world. The wide disparities between maternal health in the developing world and elective fertility treatments in the developed world are clearly unjust within Catholic social teachings. I conclude this article by offering policy suggestions for moving closer to health care justice via doctor distribution.     

CARE ETHICS AND THE GLOBAL PRACTICE OF COMMERCIAL SURROGACY

This essay will focus on the moral issues relating to surrogacy in the global context, and will critique the liberal arguments that have been offered in support of it. Liberal arguments hold sway concerning reproductive arrangements made between commissioning couples from wealthy nations and the surrogates from socioeconomically weak backgrounds that they hire to do their reproductive labor. My argument in this paper is motivated by a concern for controlling harms by putting the practice of globalized commercial surrogacy into the context of care ethics. As I will argue, the unstable situations into which children of global surrogacy arrangements are born is symbolic of the crisis of care that the practice raises. Using the Baby Manji case as my touch point, I will suggest that liberalism cannot address the harms experienced by Manji and children like her who are created through the global practice of assisted reproductive technology. I will argue that, if commissioning couples consider their proposed surrogacy contracts from a care ethics point of view, they will begin to think relationally about their actions, considering the practice from an ethical lens, not just an economic or contractual one.     

The Making of Informed Choice in Midwifery: A Feminist Experiment in Care

This paper is about the clinical principle of informed choice—the hallmark feature of the midwifery model of care in Ontario, Canada. Drawing on ethnographic history interviews with midwives, I trace the origins of the idea of informed choice to its roots in the social movement of midwifery in North America in the late 1960s and 1970s. At that time informed choice was not the distinctive feature of midwifery but was deeply embedded what I call midwifery’s feminist experiment in care. But as midwifery in Ontario transitioned from a social movement to a full profession within the formal health care system, informed choice was strategically foregrounded in order to make the midwifery model of care legible and acceptable to a skeptical medical profession, conservative law makers, and a mainstream clientele. As mainstream biomedicine now takes up the rhetoric of patient empowerment and informed choice, this paper is at once a nuanced history of the making of the concept and also a critique of the ascendant ‘regime of choice’ in contemporary health care, inspired by the reflections of the midwives in my study for whom choice is impossible without care.     

Metropolitanism and the Transformation of Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Metropoles

In this paper, I argue that the nineteenth-century movement of "metropolitanism" was a transnational attempt to rebuild and re-imagine cities in a bourgeois image and through a capitalist process of investment. This movement began with the attempt by wealthy residents of imperial metropoles to remake their cities in ways that created greater social distance between themselves and their colonies—both external and internal. I explore how a discourse with specific urban content can engender a movement that revolutionizes people's view of the city. The analysis points toward a revitalization of this movement in the present moment of global transformations, suggesting that the reshaping of urban social organization and urban institutions through transnational processes is not new. [urban, metropolitanism, colonialism, housing, architecture]     

The racialised and classed constitution of English village life

This article explores ethnographically the ‘village’ as a stage for the enactment and reproduction of a racialised set of white middle-class social and moral values. To do this I draw upon interview material with middle-class whites who live in a suburban ‘village’ on the border of rural Leicestershire and urban Leicester in England. I explore the way in which my co-conversationalists reflexively and imaginatively defend their area's ‘village’ identity through a discourse that ‘others’ its wealthy Asian residents. Although these raced others have achieved economic parity with the more affluent wealthy white middle-class residents, they are imagined to lack the ‘proper’ middle-class values of respectability and decorum, which are associated with the traditional white rhythms of English village life.     

Evolutionary history of the third chromosome gene arrangements of Drosophila pseudoobscura inferred from inversion breakpoints

The third chromosome of Drosophila pseudoobscura is polymorphic for numerous gene arrangements that form classical clines in North America. The polytene salivary chromosomes isolated from natural populations revealed changes in gene order that allowed the different gene arrangements to be linked together by paracentric inversions representing one of the first cases where genetic data were used to construct a phylogeny. Although the inversion phylogeny can be used to determine the relationships among the gene arrangements, the cytogenetic data are unable to infer the ancestral arrangement or the age of the different chromosome types. These are both important properties if one is to infer the evolutionary forces responsible for the spread and maintenance of the chromosomes. Here, we employ the nucleotide sequences of 18 regions distributed across the third chromosome in 80-100 D. pseudoobscura strains to test whether five gene arrangements are of unique or multiple origin, what the ancestral arrangement was, and what are the ages of the different arrangements. Each strain carried one of six commonly found gene arrangements and the sequences were used to infer their evolutionary relationships. Breakpoint regions in the center of the chromosome supported monophyly of the gene arrangements, whereas regions at the ends of the chromosome gave phylogenies that provided less support for monophyly of the chromosomes either because the individual markers did not have enough phylogenetically informative sites or genetic exchange scrambled information among the gene arrangements. A data set where the genetic markers were concatenated strongly supported a unique origin of the different gene arrangements. The inversion polymorphism of D. pseudoobscura is estimated to be about a million years old. We have also shown that the generated phylogeny is consistent with the cytological phylogeny of this species. In addition, the data presented here support hypothetical as the ancestral arrangement. One of the youngest arrangements, Arrowhead, has one of the highest population frequencies suggesting that selection has been responsible for its rapid increase.     

The Foundation of Kinship

Men's hunting has dominated the discourse on energy capture and flow in the past decade or so. We turn to women's roles as critical to household formation, pair-bonding, and intergenerational bonds. Their pivotal contributions in food processing and distribution likely promoted kinship, both genetic and affinal, and appear to be the foundation from which households evolved. With conscious recognition of household social units, variable cultural constructions of human kinship systems that were sensitive to environmental and technological conditions could emerge. Kinship dramatically altered the organization of resource access for our species, creating what we term "kinship ecologies." We present simple mathematical models to show how hunting leads to dependence on women's contributions, bonds men to women, and bonds generations together. Kinship, as it organized transfers of food and labor energy centered on women, also became integrated with the biological evolution of human reproduction and life history.     

Global health and justice

In Australia, Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland, the average life expectancy is now greater than 80 years. But in Angola, Malawi, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, the average life expectancy is less than 40 years. The situation is even worse than these statistics suggest because average figures tend to mask inequalities within countries. What are we to make of a world with such inequal health prospects? What does justice demand in terms of global health? To address these problems, I characterize justice at the local level, at the domestic or social level, and at the international or global level. Because social conditions, structures, and institutions have such a profound influence on the health of populations, I begin by focusing attention on the relationship between social justice and health prospects. Then I go on to discuss health prospects and the problem of global justice. Here I distinguish two views: a cosmopolitan view and a political view of global justice. In my account of global justice, I modify and use the political view that John Rawls developed in The Law of Peoples. I try to show why an adequate political account must include three duties: a duty not to harm, a duty to reconstruct international arrangements, and a duty to assist.     

The Ecology of Wealth-in-People: Agriculture, Settlement, and Society on the Perpetual Frontier

For the Susu of northwestern Sierra Leone, rural settlement dynamics reflect a frontier culture history and the perpetuation of frontier sociopolitical arrangements in village life. Under frontier conditions people are wealth. The competition among male elders for wealth-in-people is a major determinant of village movements and the organization and deployment of agricultural labor. In this article, I explore the implications of frontier social arrangements, as illustrated in the careers and lives of individual elder men, for the ecology of swidden agriculture. One significant result is a competitive scramble for labor, which both hinders crop production and leads to problems of intensification and resource degradation. I conclude that local problems of resource management are the result of individual efforts to achieve and maintain social position in the context of established systems of hierarchy.     

Estimating individual and household reproduction numbers in an emerging epidemic

Reproduction numbers, defined as averages of the number of people infected by a typical case, play a central role in tracking infectious disease outbreaks. The aim of this paper is to develop methods for estimating reproduction numbers which are simple enough that they could be applied with limited data or in real time during an outbreak. I present a new estimator for the individual reproduction number, which describes the state of the epidemic at a point in time rather than tracking individuals over time, and discuss some potential benefits. Then, to capture more of the detail that micro-simulations have shown is important in outbreak dynamics, I analyse a model of transmission within and between households, and develop a method to estimate the household reproduction number, defined as the number of households infected by each infected household. This method is validated by numerical simulations of the spread of influenza and measles using historical data, and estimates are obtained for would-be emerging epidemics of these viruses. I argue that the household reproduction number is useful in assessing the impact of measures that target the household for isolation, quarantine, vaccination or prophylactic treatment, and measures such as social distancing and school or workplace closures which limit between-household transmission, all of which play a key role in current thinking on future infectious disease mitigation.     

Maintaining the Coffee Canopy: Understanding Change and Continuity in Central Veracruz

This paper examines land-use changes and continuities following historic price declines and withdrawal of government support for coffee cultivation in Veracruz, Mexico. A time series analysis of satellite imagery from the municipalities of Xico and Coatepec was carried out to assess changes in one of Latin America’s oldest coffee-producing regions. Two case study communities were selected for in-depth assessment, including semi-structured interviews, household surveys and participant observation. This study demonstrates while small parcels were converted to new land-uses, 82 % of coffee/forest remained intact during the height of the global coffee crisis. I document how smallholders maintained historic agro-ecological spaces in the wake of destabilizing economic reforms. I argue cultural identity and access to new livelihood options combine to subsidize reproduction of coffee forests on the landscape.     

The Insectan Apes

I present evidence that humans have evolved convergently to social insects with regard to a large suite of social, ecological, and reproductive phenotypes. Convergences between humans and social insects include: (1) groups with genetically and environmentally defined structures; (2) extensive divisions of labor; (3) specialization of a relatively restricted set of females for reproduction, with enhanced fertility; (4) extensive extramaternal care; (5) within-group food sharing; (6) generalized diets composed of high-nutrient-density food; (7) solicitous juveniles, but high rates of infanticide; (8) ecological dominance; (9) enhanced colonizing abilities; and (10) collective, cooperative decision-making. Most of these convergent phenotypic adaptations stem from reorganization of key life-history trade-offs due to behavioral, physiological, and life-historical specializations. Despite their extensive socioreproductive overlap with social insects, humans differ with regard to the central aspect of eusociality: reproductive division of labor. This difference may be underpinned by the high energetic costs of producing offspring with large brains.     

Articulating School Countercultures

Starting from the observation that writings about student subcultures and antischool countercultures are much more common for wealthy English-speaking nations than elsewhere, this article develops the concept of "articulation" to help clarify the counterculture concept and differentiate fully developed countercultures from other forms of student resistance. Using examples from many nations, especially East Asia, I hope to contribute to an ethnology of schooling by exploring the social and cultural forces that promote and impede the articulation of school subcultures and countercultures.     

Within a Range of Possibilities: Morality and Ethics in Social Life

Despite its now common currency the anthropological concept of morality remains underdeveloped. One anthropologist who has made several important attempts to work out a more precise theoretical concept of morality is Joel Robbins. In his most recent contribution to this endeavor Robbins addresses the tension in anthropology between what he calls the morality of reproduction and the morality of freedom. In this article, I suggest an alternative solution to the problem of conceiving the distinction between a nonconsciously enacted morality and the conscious awareness of ethical dilemmas and moral questioning. I will support this distinction with ethnographic and life-historical material from my research on the moral lives of some Muscovites.     

Postcoloniality,National Identity,Globalisation and the Simulacra of the Real

The focus of this paper is a famous boys' boarding school in the North Indian city of Dehra Dun. The Doon School was founded in 1935 and was soon hailed by a wide cross section of post-colonial Indian intelligentsia as the site for the production of the ‘modern’ Indian citizen. The discussion below suggests that contemporary social analysis needs to focus on specific sites of the production of the discourses of the nation and citizenship rather than simply announce their dissolution as an ‘inevitable’ by-product of ‘globalisation’; this seems to be the stand taken by certain strands of theorisation in the so-called globalisation debate and in particular versions of cultural studies. I argue that rather than having simply dissolved, the ‘national’ emotion, at least in the Indian context, may have been transformed into the production of ‘post-coloniality’ as a differentiating category to distinguish the ‘progressive’ populations of the nation-state from its ‘backward’ counterparts. I employ Baudrillard's concept of the ‘real’ in order to argue for situated analyses of the contemporary global condition where analyses of the relationship between nation-states and of the asymmetries within them continue to be important political tasks.     

The Nurse of Parasites: Gender Concepts in Patrick Manson's Parasitological Research

Patrick Manson (1844-1922), the so-called father of tropical medicine, played a pivotal role in making that discipline into a specialty. During his early career in China he discovered that the mosquito was the intermediate host of the filarial parasite and he somewhat peculiarly called the mosquito the "nurse" of the filarial worm. The discovery contributed greatly to the intellectual foundation of modern parasitology. In this paper I situate Manson's nomenclature in the context of nineteenth-century biological research on reproductive mech-anisms and argue that Manson's concept of the "nurse" was derived from nineteenth-century theories of sexual division of labor in nature's economy. The way he framed the relation between the mosquito and the parasite, moreover, can be understood in the terms of the domestic arrangement of the colonial European household. Manson's research demonstrates the significant exchange between medical concerns over European women's procreative role in the tropics and biological studies of parasitic reproduction.     

XENOTRANSPLANTATION, CONSENT AND INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

The risk posed to the community by possible xenozoonosis after xenotransplantation suggests that some form of 'community consent' is required before whole organ animal-to-human xenotransplantation should take place. I argue that this requirement places greater obstacles in the path of ethical xenotransplantation than has previously been recognised. The relevant community is global and there are no existing institutions with democratic credentials sufficient to establish this consent. The distribution of the risks and benefits from xenotransplantation also means that consent is unlikely to be forthcoming. Proceeding on the basis of hypothetical consent to a package of global health measures that includes xenotransplantation, as Rothblatt has recently advocated, is more problematic than she acknowledges. Given that it may place the lives of citizens of poor nations at risk to benefit the citizens of wealthy nations, xenotransplantation raises significant questions of international justice.     

Re-Bordering the Nation: Neoliberalism and Racism in Rural Greece

Over the last several decades, rural Greek society has undergone rapid changes. In large part these changes are due to two interrelated developments: the integration of Greece into the European Union and the arrival of large numbers of Eastern European migrant laborers. Social organization in Greek villages has been influenced by global systems of production and exchange for hundreds of years, if not longer, but since the early 1980’s, with the accession of Greece into the European Union, these relations seem to have been altered in novel ways. As Greece has become integrated into the transnational and global markets through the E.U., social relations are increasingly shaped by a pervasive global trend toward neoliberalism, that is, by a new round of market liberalization that has in effect redefined the way that local communities and international markets interact. This change has had a profound effect on the ways that rural Greeks participate in international markets as both producers and consumers. A related development, in fact a by-product of neoliberal policies in the formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe, is the introduction of large numbers of immigrant laborers into rural Greece, which has significantly altered rural labor markets and allowed for important changes in patterns of the social reproduction of labor. While these changes have been for the most part not of their own making, except perhaps in an indirect way, Greek agriculturalists are not hapless victims in these developments. Globalization has indeed brought changes to rural society, but not exactly in the ways that policy-makers or others with a “top -- down” perspective have imagined. During ethnographic fieldwork that I conducted in several Greek villages between 2000 and 2004 I found that rural people have engaged these changes in the global political economy through an active process of adaptation, manipulation, resistance and accommodation. Here I will focus on changes in the mobilization of labor and the production of national identity, and the relationship between the two. I will argue that there has been a transformation in how national identities are being produced within the new configuration of nation and state that has important implications for understanding how inequality is structured and reproduced under global capitalism.     

Biological explanations and social responsibility

The aim of this paper is to show that critics of biological explanations of human nature may be granting too much to those who oppose such explanations when they argue that the truth of genetic determinism implies an end to critical evaluation and reform of our social institutions. This is the case because when we argue that biological determinism exempts us from social critique we are erroneously presupposing that our social values, practices, and institutions have nothing to do with what makes biological explanations troublesome. My argument is that what constitutes a problem for those who are concerned with social justice is not the fact that particular behaviours may be genetically determined, but the fact that our value system, and social institutions create the conditions that make such behaviours problematic. Thus, I will argue that even if genetic determinism were correct, the requirement of assessing and transforming our social practices and institutions would be far from superfluous. Biology is rarely destiny for human beings and the institutions they create.