Extension of Peto's Test by Attribution of Tumor Lethality in the Absence of Cause‐of‐Death Information

A new statistical testing approach is developed for rodent tumorigenicity assays that have a single terminal sacrifice or occasionally interim sacrifices but not cause‐of‐death data. For experiments that lack cause‐of‐death data, statistically imputed numbers of fatal tumors and incidental tumors are used to modify Peto's cause‐of‐death test which is usually implemented using pathologist‐assigned cause‐of‐death information. The numbers of fatal tumors are estimated using a constrained nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method. A new Newton‐based approach under inequality constraints is proposed for finding the global maximum likelihood estimates. In this study, the proposed method is concentrated on data with a single sacrifice experiment without implementing further assumptions. The new testing approach may be more reliable than Peto's test because of the potential for a misclassification of cause‐of‐death by pathologists. A Monte Carlo simulation study for the proposed test is conducted to assess size and power of the test. Asymptotic normality for the statistic of the proposed test is also investigated. The proposed testing approach is illustrated using a real data set.     

Afterthoughts on Sacrifice

These stimulating essays provoke a number of brief reflections on what we can know about sacrifice, in both its ritual and non-ritual and its violent and nonviolent aspects, reflections concerning its seriousness, reverberations, interpellation, temporality, naming, instrumentality, and heterogeneity.     

Time for Self-Sacrifice: Temporal Narratives,Politics and Ideals in African Prophetism

In this article I propose an approach to sacrifice through notions of time, memory and expectation, moving away from classical formalist definitions that highlight the ‘nature and function’ of sacrifice, and into ideas of meaning and experience and their insertion in particular ideologies of time. I will argue that sacrifice entails particular temporalities, participating in political and experiential realms of memory and expectation. For this, I will invoke a particular regime of sacrifice: the notion of self-sacrifice, as it circulates among a prophetic and messianic Christian movement of Angolan origin, the Tokoist Church.     

Sacrifice as Social Capital among Israeli Conscientious Objectors

This article considers counterhegemonic sacrifices as a means of social intervention, and in doing so explores the social efficacy of non-ritual sacrifice in the modern era. Ethnographically, this article examines the way Israeli conscientious objectors succeed in having their refusal of military service and the social costs they incur understood as sacrifices by the Israeli public. Ex-soldiers accumulate social capital in light of public perception that they have ‘paid the price’ for their beliefs. Other ethnographic contexts that further elucidate the ability of socially abject to use sacrifice to counterhegemonic effect are presented. I claim that the recognition of sacrifice depends on an intersubjective combination of sacrificial intention and community recognition. This article suggests that the meaning of sacrifice is determined by how sacrifice is used and understood in social context, and as such breaks ranks with literatures on sacrifice concerned with the intrinsic coherence of ritual sacrifice.     

La symbolique des gravures rupestres du Mont Bego

The analysis of imaginary anthropological structures elaborated by Gilbert Durand enables us to identify a symbolic language of ideograms from Mont Bego (circa 2500-1800 BC). There are three main types of figures: figures associated with the Bull- God and with the God of Storms, which come under the first function “heroic”; figures depicting harnessing and reticulates which evoke ploughed fields ands make reference to the feminine and maternal function known as “mystic nocturne”; figures linked to initiation, to the relationship between the first and the second function, which come under the function known as “synthetic nocturne”. These figures are located particularlyon the slab known as the “witch”. A comparative study of the later symbolic figures, presented in worship practises in archaic and then classic Greece and in the Greek-Roman imaginary, helps us to understand that Mediterranean mankind portrays a coherent image of the cosmos. This image is stable from the proto-Ligurian figures of Mont Bego until the forms elaborated by the Greek-Roman religious imaginary, in particular through mysterious rituals.     

A case of Carrion's disease associated with human sacrifice from the Huari culture of Southern Peru

A case of Carrion's disease in the verruga phase from a mummy of the Tiahuanaco culture of Southern Peru is reported. The characteristics of the disease are described as well as the bacterium. The man was apparently sacrificed and certain organs used in rituals.