Mediat(iz)ing Catholicism: saint,spectacle, and theopolitics in Lima,Peru

This article examines the annual public procession in Lima, Peru, of the Señor de los Milagros (Lord of Miracles) in relation to issues at the intersection of Catholic Christianity, media, and political authority. Through a theopolitical lens alert to the intermeshing of political sovereignty and authority with theological (Catholic) worldviews, I inquire into media and the Señor de los Milagros procession along three key intersecting themes that link scales of local and global Catholicism: performance, identity/belonging, and control. Key to my argument is the idea of the miraculous (lo milagroso), a culturally resonant register of embodied affective experience with compelling power, which points to how senses of belonging, authority, and ‘proper’ Catholic subjecthoods are intensified by Catholicism's diffusion through new mediatic forms, especially in church-generated productions. A consideration of media technologies, mediation, and Catholicism nuances theoretical assumptions within the anthropology of Christianity, and also suggests that the anthropology of religion should attend more closely to mediation and mediatization as newer media infrastructures – channelling flows of information, images, and affects – extend ‘the religious’ into other social spheres.     

Modelling emotion,perfecting heart: disassembling technologies of affect with an android bodhisattva in Japan

As part of a surge in technologies with so-called ‘artificial emotional intelligence’, robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors’ feelings. For this reason, it can be called a ‘technology of affect’. In order to communicate how new affective technologies are facilitating intimacy in human-machine relations in Japan, we employ the concept of ‘disassembling’. By conceptually disassembling technologies of affect and placing them in performative contexts, we show how technologies of affect also disassemble established associations between artificial agents and the feelings they evoke in popular imaginaries. We argue that identifying these disassembling processes helps demonstrate how emerging AI technologies can engender social change at the level of affect through evocative depictions of machine emotion.     

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.     

Adaptation,fitness and the selection-optimality links

We critically examine a number of aspects of Grafen’s ‘formal Darwinism’ project. We argue that Grafen’s ‘selection-optimality’ links do not quite succeed in vindicating the working assumption made by behavioural ecologists and others—that selection will lead organisms to exhibit adaptive behaviour—since these links hold true even in the presence of strong genetic and developmental constraints. However we suggest that the selection-optimality links can profitably be viewed as constituting an axiomatic theory of fitness. Finally, we compare Grafen’s project with Fisher’s ‘fundamental theorem of natural selection’, and we speculate about whether Grafen’s results can be extended to a game-theoretic setting.     

The life history and decline of the threatened Australian frog,Litoria raniformis

A popular idea amongst ecologists last century was that animals which exploit dynamic environments often display ‘fast’ life history strategies (high fecundity, rapid growth and maturation, and low or variable adult survival rates) relative to those which occupy more stable environments. Whilst the underlying theory has been discredited, the categorization remains of interest, because species with ‘fast’ life history traits are thought to be more robust to human‐induced environmental change than those with ‘slow’ life history traits. We examined the life history traits of the endangered Australian frog Litoria raniformis, to determine whether it displays ‘fast’ life history traits (like its sister species L. aurea and L. castanea), and to assess the role of these traits in the decline of this species. Mark‐recapture data confirmed that L. raniformis displays rapid growth and maturation. The data also suggest that L. raniformis displays relatively low adult survival rates. We propose that the ‘fast’ life history traits of this species are adaptive to metapopulation dynamics. In turn, we suggest that the rapid decline of L. raniformis may have resulted from metapopulation collapse, driven ultimately by habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and proximately by severe stochastic perturbations.     

Beyond ‘Riot Porn’: Protest Video and the Production of Unruly Subjects

From the globalization protests of the previous decade to the more recent Occupy Movement, activists have embraced the use of digital video. Many appropriations of the technology, including those by human rights advocates, rest on the theory that ‘seeing is believing’ and understand video to be uniquely suited to forms of truth telling such as witnessing, documenting and reporting. While I encountered such realist uses of video during fieldwork with direct action movements in the former Yugoslavia, activists are also preoccupied with videos depicting the most physical confrontations with the police, videos they sometimes referred to as ‘riot porn’. They engage these videos for the sensory, affective and bodily experiences they facilitate. Indeed, activist practices around and claims for video indicate that they understand video as a technology of the self, using it to forge emotional relationships with activists elsewhere, steel themselves for physical confrontation and cultivate new political desires.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.     

Male-like females, mimicry and transvestism in butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionidae)

Abstract. When a butterfly species has a polymorphic female, with one of the forms closely resembling the male, it is customary to suppose that this form is ancestral, and that the ‘odd’ forms have arisen later. R. I. Vane-Wright, on the other hand, has suggested that in some species the male-like form may be a ‘transvestite’ female, the ancestral form of the female having been strikingly unlike the male. As later-derived forms are usually, but not always, genetically dominant to ancestral forms, we can make some choice between these hypotheses by discovering the dominance relations of the male-like and the ‘odd’ forms of the female. In the mimetic Papilio aegeus the male-like form is shown to be recessive to the ‘odd’ (mimetic) form, as has essentially been the case in all other butterflies so far investigated. Papilio phorcas is now shown to be the exception: the ‘odd’ (non-mimetic) form is recessive to the male-like form. We conclude that usually the male-like form is ancestral, but that P.phorcas may be an authentic example of ‘transvestism’, or the ‘transfer’ of male epigamic colour to the female of the species. The yellow, male-like pattern of the mimetic Papilio dardanus may be dominant or recessive to the mimetic forms according to the genetic background: largely recessive in Madagascar, and southern and western Africa, dominant to most forms in Ethiopia, and probably dominant to one mimetic form but recessive to the others in Kenya. All female dardanus patterns, both mimetic and yellow, are strongly dominant to both female phorcas patterns in P. dardanus × P. phorcas hybrids (P. ‘nandina’). The simplest explanation of this situation is that the male-like pattern of dardanus is ancestral, and that dominance has become locally reversed in Ethiopia. The dominance relations, and the sex- or autosomal-linkage of two forms can be determined without pedigree-breeding, simply by observing a few offspring each from a large number of wild-caught females.     

The evolutionary history of the ‘alba’ polymorphism in the butterfly subfamily Coliadinae (Lepidoptera: Pieridae)

Polymorphisms are common in the natural world and have played an important role in our understanding of how selection maintains multiple phenotypes within extant populations. Studying the evolutionary history of polymorphisms has revealed important features of this widespread form of phenotypic diversity, including its role in speciation, niche breadth, and range size. In the present study, we examined the evolutionary history of a ubiquitous colour polymorphism in the sulphur butterflies (subfamily: Coliadinae) termed the ‘alba’ polymorphism. We investigated the origin and stability of the ‘alba’ polymorphism using ancestral state reconstruction analysis. Our results indicate that the ancestor of the Coliadinae was polymorphic and that this polymorphism has undergone repeated transitions to monomorphism. Repeated loss of polymorphism suggests that the ‘alba’ polymorphism may be relatively unstable over evolutionary time. These results provide a framework for future studies on the origin and maintenance of the ‘alba’ polymorphism and guide the direction of future hypotheses. We discuss these results in light of current understandings of how the ‘alba’ polymorphism is maintained in extant populations.     

How to tell a shrub from a tree: A life‐history perspective from a South African savanna

The ecological differences between ‘shrubs’ and ‘trees’ are surprisingly poorly understood and clear ecological definitions of these two constructs do not exist. It is not clear whether a shrub is simply a small tree or whether shrubs represent a distinct life‐history strategy. This question is of special interest in African savannas, where shrubs and trees often co‐dominate, but are often treated uniformly as ‘woody plants’ even though the tree to shrub ratio is an important determinant of ecosystem functioning. In this study we use data from a long‐term fire experiment, together with a trait‐based approach to test (i) if woody species usually classified as shrubs or trees in African savanna differ in key traits related to disturbance and resource use; and (ii) if these differences justify the interpretation of the two growth forms as distinct life‐history strategies. We measured for 22 of the most common woody plant species of a South African savanna 27 plant traits related to plant architecture, life‐history, leaf characteristics, photosynthesis and resprouting capacity. Furthermore we evaluated their performance during a long‐term fire experiment. We found that woody plants authors call (i) shrubs; (ii) shrubs sometimes small trees; and (3) trees responded differently to long‐term fire treatments. We additionally found significant differences in architecture, diameter‐height‐allometry, foliage density, resprouting vigour after fire, minimum fruiting height and foliar δ¹³C between these three woody plant types. We interpret these findings as evidence for at least two different life‐history‐strategies: an avoidance/adaptation strategy for shrubs (early reproduction + adaptation to minor disturbance) and an escape strategy for trees (promoted investment in height growth + delayed reproduction).     

Declarations of dependence: labour,personhood, and welfare in southern Africa

Dependence on others has often figured, in liberal thought, as the opposite of freedom. But the political anthropology of southern Africa has long recognized relations of social dependence as the very foundation of polities and persons alike. Reflecting on a long regional history of dependence ‘as a mode of action’ allows a new perspective on certain contemporary practices that appear to what we may call ‘the emancipatory liberal mind’ simply as lamentable manifestations of a reactionary and retrograde yearning for paternalism and inequality. Instead, this article argues that such practices are an entirely contemporary response to the historically novel emergence of a social world where people, long understood (under both pre‐capitalist and early capitalist social systems) as scarce and valuable, have instead become seen as lacking value, and in surplus. Implications are drawn for contemporary politics and policy, in a world where both labour and forms of social membership based upon it are of diminishing value, and where social assistance and the various cash transfers associated with it are of increasing significance.     

Dissemination pathways of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris,Fabaceae) deduced from phaseolin electrophoretic variability. II. Europe and Africa

Phaseolin type, determined by one-dimensional sodium dodecyl sulfate polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, was used to suggest dissemination routes of common bean (Thaseolus vulgaris) cultivars from their areas of domestication to Europe and Africa. In the Iberian Peninsula, ‘C’ was the most frequent phaseolin type. Only in Chile has a comparably high ‘C’ frequency been observed previously, indicating that many Iberian cultivars may have been introduced from Chile, or that many Chilean cultivars may have come from the Iberian Peninsula. In Europe (outside the Iberian Peninsula), most cultivars exhibited a ‘T’ type. The high frequency of this type may be related to the high frequency of green pod cultivars among European cultivars. Most African cultivars exhibited a ‘T’ or a ‘C’ type and may have been introduced from Brazil, the Iberian Peninsula, or western Europe. ‘T’ or ‘C’ cultivars had larger seeds than ‘S’ cultivars. The phaseolin patterns of cultivars with different seed types and of early French cultivars are discussed.     

The Anthropocene narrative and Amerindian lifeworlds: anthropos,agency, and personhood

Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We discuss the differences in conceptualizations in relation to diverging understandings of climate change and the Anthropocene, focusing on perspectives on agentivity both within our respective ethnographical fields and in modernist social sciences. This leads us to stress the significance of new materialists’ disregard for intentionality in relation to agency and the consequences this neglect has for understanding animist perspectives. We examine the different views in relation to their effects on morality and to perceived forms of accountability. In accordance, the modernist ‘global we’, prominent in the Anthropocene debate stressing the role of humanity as a species, is contrasted with what we call a ‘universal we’, which includes both human and other-than-human persons, in conformance with Amerindian animist perspectives on the world. This approach to the issue does not only mean that we challenge the obvious iniquity in blaming all of humanity for climate change but also that we point to the coloniality of reality implicit in the Anthropocene narrative.     

Evolution, origin and age of lineages in the Californian and Mediterranean floras

This paper addresses some of the conceptual issues involved in the analysis of the age and origin of mediterranean‐climate plant taxa, paying particular attention to three topics: (1) the importance of an explicit time frame in the definition of biogeographical origins, (2) the distinction between the age of traits and the age of taxa, and (3) the idea of mediterranean‐type ecosystems as environmental islands. (1) In California, recent analyses demonstrate that the diversity of species derived from different biogeographical origins is significantly correlated with temperature and precipitation gradients. These patterns support the hypothesis that niche conservatism is an important factor structuring modern diversity gradients. However, depending on how far back in time one looks, a species may be assigned to different origins; future discussions of biogeographical origins need to address the appropriate time frame for analysis. (2) Past research has demonstrated distinctive trait syndromes among woody plants of the Mediterranean, Chile, California and Mexico, and proposed that the syndromes are associated with lineages of different age in these floras. Reanalysis of individual traits demonstrates greater variability among regions than previously reported. The classification of plants into ‘old’ and ‘new’ genera is re‐evaluated, and it is suggested that greater attention be paid to the age of traits, rather than to the age of taxa, especially at an arbitrary rank such as genus. (3) The idea of mediterranean‐climate regions as ‘climatic islands’ is examined. Space–time diagrams of climate enable one to view the emergence of distinctive climatic regions in a continental context. The terms ‘synclimatic’ and ‘anticlimatic’ are proposed, referring to migration routes that parallel climate contours in space and time versus those that cross contours (including the case of geographic stasis in the face of climate change), respectively. Mediterranean‐climate regions have served as important case studies in plant ecology and evolution, and merit continued close examination in the light of continued advances in phylogenetics and palaeoecology.     

Macroevolutionary patterns in Rhynchocephalia: is the tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) a living fossil?

The tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, known from 32 small islands around New Zealand, has often been noted as a classic ‘living fossil’ because of its apparently close resemblance to its Mesozoic forebears and because of a long, low‐diversity history. This designation has been disputed because of the wide diversity of Mesozoic forms and because of derived adaptations in living Sphenodon. We provide a testable definition for ‘living fossils’ based on a slow rate of lineage evolution and a morphology close to the centroid of clade morphospace. We show that through their history since the Triassic, rhynchocephalians had heterogeneous rates of morphological evolution and occupied wide morphospaces during the Triassic and Jurassic, and these then declined in the Cretaceous. In particular, we demonstrate that the extant tuatara underwent unusually slow lineage evolution, and is morphologically conservative, being located near the centre of the morphospace for all Rhynchocephalia.     

The annual Day of the Dead song contest: musical‐linguistic ideology and practice,piratability, and the challenge of scale

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to ‘stranger collectives’ like nations, ethnicities, and global religious ‘communities’. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of ‘customizing’ modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People ‘re‐imagine’ locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical‐linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become ‘unpiratable’, and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale.     

Forgetfulness without memory: reconstruction,landscape, and the politics of the everyday in post-earthquake Gujarat,India

For many good reasons, after natural disasters it is common to work with ‘memory’ as part of a collective catharsis and a globalized humanitarian logic. Long-term anthropological research on the aftermath of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, however, also demonstrates the significance of forgetting in local practice. Immediately after the disaster, people vowed to abandon the sites of their loss, leave the ruins as monuments, and rebuild anew on safer ground. In time, though, life returned to the ruins as the terrible proximity of death receded, as memories and new salience were shaped by acts of reconstruction. The article explores some of the political and social factors that make this form of forgetting possible – or even necessary. Evidence of earlier earthquakes in the same region indicates that such ‘forgetting’ has an established history. Together, ethnographic and archival materials combine to cast doubt over the emphasis on ‘remembering’ as the only ‘memory solution’ to suffering.     

‘Demo version of a city’: buildings,affects, and the state in Astana

This article brings the concept of affect to the analysis of the relationship between buildings and political ideology, as a way of contributing to recent anthropological work on the state. It focuses ethnographically on the contradictory affects of the new built environment in Kazakhstan's capital, Astana, where extensive renovation and construction have been under way since the early 2000s. On the one hand, spectacular new structures induced feelings of hope, pride, and enthusiasm for the state in some citizens. Simultaneously, the unfamiliar designs and material defects of the new built environment emanated affects of estrangement, lifelessness, disingenuousness, and instability. The article examines how these different affects were qualified and mediated discursively. Official ‘propaganda of emotion’ is juxtaposed with unofficial discursive forms: puns, rumours, and satirical literary fiction. It is argued that largely uncontrolled affects, rather than ideology, rendered ‘the state’ a plausible, if contradictory, ‘fictional reality’.     

Genuinely made up: camp,baroque, and other denaturalizing aesthetics in the cultural production of the real

The link that Jean‐Jacques Rousseau forged a long time ago between the ‘real’ and the ‘natural’ has proved to be indissoluble. Time and again, contemporary constructions of the real mobilize all that can be linked to nature. Inauthentic, by contrast, is that which is fabricated, made up, artificial, the all‐too‐evident result of human design. In Bahia, Brazil, the author encountered a completely different mode in the cultural production of the real. Analysing the performance of a Bahian drag queen who goes by the name of Gina da Mascar, the author discusses ‘camp’ and ‘baroque’ as registers that foster a sensibility for (and appreciation of) cultural forms that are ‘truly false’. He shows how the appeal of these registers – their persuasiveness, their form of truth‐telling – resonates with the sensibilities of people whose biographies are marked by radical discontinuities, and he argues that these registers might be understood as a popular articulation of the Lacanian understanding that symbolic closure is an impossibility.     

‘Hip to be Irish’: ethnicity and Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’

A ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity surfaced in the 1980s – according to a number of scholars and journalists – and is comprised of what some consider to be more ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Irish cultural attributes. Defining authentic and traditional Irishness is complicated, however, by the recent influx and highly visible forms of economic capital and media attention stemming from the Celtic Tiger – the surge of economic prosperity that began in Ireland in the 1990s – and the commercializing of Irish music and dance – such as Riverdance. In this paper, I propose, through my study involving Irish language enthusiasts, that this ‘new’ form of Irish ethnicity is more the result of rather than the reason for this surge in popularity. I use Pierre Bourdieu's ‘Forms of Capital’ in questioning the ‘new Irish’ American ethnicity, arguing instead that a deeply seated, less-visible reservoir of cultural and social capital form the basis for this perceived contemporary ethnicity.