scholarly journals From Ashes to Diamonds

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 122-138
Author(s):  
Filipe Calvão ◽  
Lindsay Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Genetic Material ◽  
The United States ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Synthetic Diamonds ◽  
Artificial Memory ◽  
Emotional Value ◽  
Living Objects

This article examines the making and makers of “memorial diamonds.” These are “natural” diamonds identical to gemstones found in nature but produced in laboratories with carbon sourced from genetic material (cremation ashes) or other objects of symbolic and emotional value. Threading corporality and objectified life forms, we examine the transformation from ashes to the “afterlife” of these “living” objects that are at once synthetic and organic. We ask, first, what material and affective properties distinguish synthetic diamonds from those extracted from nature? Second, how are these living and memorialized representations of inert substances – in continuity with bodily elements of the deceased – valued and mediated through “real” human, though artificially grown, natural objects? Drawing from research with the leading companies in the memorial diamond business in Switzerland and the United States, this article suggests that these diamonds’ singular connection to the human body offer a window into the transmutations between nature and the artificial, memory and material likeness, life and death.

scholarly journals Decreasing Human Body Temperature in the United States Since the Industrial Revolution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myroslava Protsiv ◽  
Catherine Ley ◽  
Joanna Lankester ◽  
Trevor Hastie ◽  
Julie Parsonnet
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Body Temperature ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Body Temperature

scholarly journals Confronting the North’s South: On Race and Violence in the United States

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliot Currie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Development ◽  
Southern History ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Crime And Punishment ◽  
The Us ◽  
Northern Country ◽  
Structural Roots

More than any other ‘Northern’ country, the United States is distinctive in the degree to which its social, economic, and cultural development has been entwined with the global South from the beginning: and we cannot adequately understand the state of crime and punishment in the US without taking that uniquely ‘Southern’ history into account. In this paper, I sketch some of the dimensions of one crucial reflection of that Southern legacy: the extraordinary racial disparities in the experience of violent death between African-Americans and Whites. These disparities contribute substantially to radically different patterns of life and death between the races, and constitute a genuine social and public health emergency. But their structural roots remain largely unaddressed; and in some respects, the prospects for seriously confronting these fundamental inequalities may be receding.

ABRAHAM JACOBI ON MEDICAL SPECIALIZATION, AS VIEWED IN 1880

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
General Practitioner ◽  
American Medical Association ◽  
Medical Association ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Special Property ◽  
The United States ◽  
Practical Skill ◽  
Medical Specialization ◽  
Great Progress

Abraham Jacobi (1830-1919), this country's first professor of infantile pathology and therapeutics, and the first to establish a children's clinic in the United States (1860), had strong views concerning medical specialization. This is evident in the quotation below, taken from an address he gave at the 1880 meeting of the American Medical Association.1 We are surrounded by specialists of all sizes and regions. The human body is held no longer to be an organism, but a conglomerate of organs which have no connection with each other. One man doctors the eye as another plays on the violin; another the larynx, as one plays the harp; another on the rectum, as one handles the bass. Eyes are by this time a recognized specialty, the practice on which requires a great deal of practical skill and dexterity. The ears have been thrown in, as, though the diagnosis of their diseases has made great progress, their medication and other treatment is, in many cases, rather a thankless task. Nose, throat, and larynx have been conquered as special property. Lungs and heart are also claimed as such; the urinary organs are invaded by specialists; the sexual organs of the male are the field of operation on the part of specialists; the sexual organs of the female, with their appendages, are sacred property of another class, and these appendages are said to extend from top to toe; the skin, this fourteen square feet domain, is no longer subject to the general practitioner; the hair is coveted by one specialist, corns by another, nervous diseases by this, rheumatism by that specialist.

“From factory to field”: USAID and the logistics of foreign aid in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan

2017 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 719-738 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Attewell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Aid ◽  
International Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
Agency For International Development

Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics’ historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to supply mujahideen forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the non-lethal materiel necessary for their insurgency. It argues that USAID understood its relief and rehabilitation mission as a problem of logistics. By sketching the shifting contours of USAID’s cross-border programming, this article offers a more nuanced diagnosis of how logistics has become essential to the management of life and death across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales.

Blasian Invasion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myra S. Washington
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Genetic Material ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Ancestry ◽  
Dominant Discourses

This book examines the racialization of Blasians – mixed race people with Black and Asian ancestry – that neither sees them as new or unique, nor as a racial salve to move the United States past the problem of the colour line. The emergence of Blasian celebrities and the analyses of these stars acknowledges that to understand what and who is a Blasian means to first understand hegemonic notions of both Blacks and Asian/Americans. Contextualized against those dominant discourses Blasians explode the narrow boundaries of authenticity around racialized categories. Multiracial people are just as capable as monoracial people of upholding hierarchies of identity, as well as dismantling those hierarchies. Thus, in this book Blasians do not escape race, or erase race, but they do deconstruct normative instantiations of identity. The presence, mobility, and utility of these multiracial celebrities within both U.S. and global racial schemas simultaneously realize and complicate potential alternatives to racial and racist paradigms. These mixed race stars draw attention to how risible and absurd the biological and cultural premises for racialization truly are, and demonstrate potential alternatives for affiliation that do not rely on genetic material.

American Elegy: A Triptych

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Mariner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Children ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Northern Coast ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Interracial Violence

On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove her SUV off a cliff along the northern coast of California with her partner and at least five of their transracially adopted Black children inside. Their remains were recovered at the crash site. As of this writing, a sixth child, Devonte, remains missing and is presumed dead. Four years before the crash, Devonte was famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon. By simultaneously occupying the feel-good spectacle of interracial intimacy and the everyday tragedy of interracial violence, Devonte embodies and embodied the conditions of contemporary Black life and death in the United States. His disappearance is intimately linked to other forms and histories of American state violence. Through cultural analysis, autoethnography, and poetic intervention, this essay performs wake work as a method for living with the unmournable.

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