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Biology ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 87
Author(s):  
Kamryn Keys ◽  
Ann H. Ross

In forensic scenarios involving homicide, human remains are often exposed to fire as a means of disposal and/or obscuring identity. Burning human remains can result in the concealment of traumatic injury, the creation of artifacts resembling injury, or the destruction of preexisting trauma. Since fire exposure can greatly influence trauma preservation, methods to differentiate trauma signatures from burning artifacts are necessary to conduct forensic analyses. Specifically, in the field of forensic anthropology, criteria to distinguish trauma from fire signatures on bone is inconsistent and sparse. This study aims to supplement current forensic anthropological literature by identifying criteria found to be the most diagnostic of fire damage or blunt force trauma. Using the skulls of 11 adult pigs (Sus scrofa), blunt force trauma was manually produced using a crowbar and flat-faced hammer. Three specimens received no impacts and were utilized as controls. All skulls were relocated to an outdoor, open-air fire where they were burned until a calcined state was achieved across all samples. Results from this experiment found that blunt force trauma signatures remained after burning and were identifiable in all samples where reassociation of fragments was possible. This study concludes that distinct patterns attributed to thermal fractures and blunt force fractures are identifiable, allowing for diagnostic criteria to be narrowed down for future analyses.


Author(s):  
Adam Reed

Abstract The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (12) ◽  
pp. 1109
Author(s):  
Brent K. S. Woodfill

After groundbreaking work by multiple archaeologists in the latter half of the 20th century, caves in the Maya world are currently acknowledged as fundamentally ritual rather than domestic spaces. However, a more nuanced read of the anthropological literature and conversations with Indigenous collaborators in the past and present pushes us to move still farther and see caves not as passive contexts to contain ceremonies directed elsewhere but animate beings with unique identities and personalities in their own right. This article combines archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic documentation of Maya cave use in central Guatemala to build a foundation for examining caves as living beings, with particular attention played to the role they play as active agents in local politics and quotidian life. Through ritual offerings, neighboring residents and travelers maintain tight reciprocal relationships with specific caves and other geographic idiosyncrasies dotting the landscape to ensure the success of multiple important activities and the continued well-being of families and communities.


2021 ◽  
pp. 312-341
Author(s):  
Maarten Mous

A close inspection of the anthropological literature on Iraqw (Cushitic, Tanzania) reveals that central properties in their culture include the relative importance of social relations and hence community over kinship relations, the relevance of relative rather than absolute time, the centrality of space in culture and the importance of ritual cleansiness. The paper investigates to what extend the Iraqw language reflects this. Language being a social construct is expected to reflect social structure over time, both in lexicon and in grammar. Indeed the Iraqw language reflects their social structure in a number of way. Their verbal art emphasizes the need for peace in the community and is strongly communal in performance. This is evident, for example, in the rituals for lifting a curse. The centrality of community is reflected in various part of the lexicon. expression for pride being one of them, or the factor of companionship in possession. It is also grammaticalised in an extension of the function of the impersonal subject pronoun to express actions done together. Iraqw mythology and tales never attempt to indicate a point on time and only report chronology of event. This conceptualisation of time is reflected in the absence of lexical elements for absolute time and the abstract notion time. Furthermore the language forces specification of gender in any direct address: the second person pronoun is gender specified, kinship terms used for address are all gender specified as is the interjection for attention. Iraqw shows signs for a disappearing in-law respect register.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Veronica Adams

<p>Pharmaceuticals have become synonymous with ideas of health and wellbeing. The consumption of pharmaceuticals has become the gateway to restoring, maintaining, or improving one’s health; in turn becoming deeply entrenched in everyday life as treatment for disease. Given the use of pharmaceuticals for treatment, the question needs to be asked how individuals are able to obtain the medication they need. There is little anthropological literature concerning how patients negotiate and lobby for access to pharmaceutical treatment in New Zealand, particularly so in the face of Pharmac as the government entity which heavily regulates pharmaceuticals. Through conducting interviews with nine participants who are patients, general practitioners, and employees of Pharmac, I argue that in utilising policies such as cost utility analysis Pharmac prioritise which medicines are publically funded, and in doing this determine how health is conceived and calculated within the New Zealand health care system. In determining which medicines should be funded the state is making judgements over which lives are prioritised, and, in turn, who is left to die. I suggest that in the face of being denied access to life-saving drugs patients become mobilised through seeking access to experimental therapies via pharmaceutical companies. By taking these experimental treatments we come to understand that experimentation and risk have become crucial in patients fight for life against the prognosis of an early death from disease.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Veronica Adams

<p>Pharmaceuticals have become synonymous with ideas of health and wellbeing. The consumption of pharmaceuticals has become the gateway to restoring, maintaining, or improving one’s health; in turn becoming deeply entrenched in everyday life as treatment for disease. Given the use of pharmaceuticals for treatment, the question needs to be asked how individuals are able to obtain the medication they need. There is little anthropological literature concerning how patients negotiate and lobby for access to pharmaceutical treatment in New Zealand, particularly so in the face of Pharmac as the government entity which heavily regulates pharmaceuticals. Through conducting interviews with nine participants who are patients, general practitioners, and employees of Pharmac, I argue that in utilising policies such as cost utility analysis Pharmac prioritise which medicines are publically funded, and in doing this determine how health is conceived and calculated within the New Zealand health care system. In determining which medicines should be funded the state is making judgements over which lives are prioritised, and, in turn, who is left to die. I suggest that in the face of being denied access to life-saving drugs patients become mobilised through seeking access to experimental therapies via pharmaceutical companies. By taking these experimental treatments we come to understand that experimentation and risk have become crucial in patients fight for life against the prognosis of an early death from disease.</p>


2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Tatek Abebe

Any discussion of the “family collective” and the place of children within it requires an understanding of what constitutes a family and what a child is. Since ”family”, “child” and “agency” are all value-laden notions full of meanings, and vary cross-culturally, they need to be unpacked, and this is one of the things I will be doing throughout this lecture. What is a family? Is there one ideal Ethiopian family collective? Who is the ageless, genderless and culture-neutral “child”? Also, how is the agency of children in the plural differentiated, intersected and dissected by religion, ethnicity, stage of childhood, and social maturity, as well as rural and urban locations? To what extent are the actions of children constrained or enhanced by the family collective and vice versa? Clearly, these are very broad and complex questions, and while I do not attempt to answer them all, I try to approach them from the perspective of my own discipline of geography, largely focusing on rural-urban contrasts, differences and linkages. In so doing, I underline some overlaps, contradictions and peculiarities in the ways in which children exercise agency within families by drawing on (and sometimes inferring from) the limited sociological and anthropological literature on the issue (Hammond 2004, Poluha 2004, 2008, Hamer 1987, Hamer & Hamer 1994), as well as my own research (Abebe 2008). My lecture is organized along the following lines. I begin with problematizing the Ethiopian family collective and present a discussion of families and households, and their diverse structures, forms and functions. Second, I explore the concept of childhood, focusing on how notable lifecycle events, such as birth, name-giving, circumcision, and christening,  are infused with notions of agency, particularly ones related to symbolic agency. Finally, I discuss how children experience authority  while growing up, and exercise agency to varying degrees and in contexts in which they find themselves. I wish to emphasize from the  outset that this attempt is only descriptive and although I give examples whenever possible, this is at the risk of making generalizations  about the otherwise ethnically and culturally diverse country of Ethiopia, which, demographically speaking, is also the second most  populous nation in sub-Saharan Africa.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 154-155
Author(s):  
Virginia Sanchini ◽  
◽  
Roberta Sala ◽  
Chris Gastmans ◽  
◽  
...  

"Background. Vulnerability is a key concept in traditional – as well as contemporary – bioethics and medical ethics (Ten Have 2015, 2016). Within this literature, the concept of vulnerability is mostly defined in relation to autonomy: vulnerability refers to conditions of impaired and/or diminished autonomy (Belmont Report 1979; CIOMS 1991, 1993, 2002; WMA 2000, 2008; Bracken-Roche et al. 2017). Historically, vulnerability has been associated with several categories of agents, amongst which the elderly are paramount. However, no clear and unique conceptualization of vulnerability, when referred to the ageing population, is currently present – especially in domains other than research ethics: some refer to physiological degradation as a defining tenet, some others appeal to autonomy impairment, some others point to loneliness and isolation (Kahana et al. 1995; Slaets 2006; Dodds 2007; Andrew et al. 2008: Sternberg et al. 2011; Clegg et al. 2013). To fill this gap, we examined the meaning, foundations, and uses of vulnerability as ethical concept in the literature of aged care. Method. Using PRISMA procedure, we conducted a systematic review of argument-based ethics publications in 4 major databases (Pubmed, Embase, Web of Science, and Philosopher’s Index) of biomedical, philosophy, bioethical, and anthropological literature that focused on vulnerability in aged care. 5,735 results were obtained. Titles and abstracts were all screened. We are now in the process of full articles screening. All includes articles will then be critically analyzed. The results of this analysis process as well as a critical reflection on the results will be presented at the EACME conference. "


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 112-127
Author(s):  
Martin Holbraad

With reference to one man’s remarkable struggle to rebuild his home in Havana following its partial collapse, this article contributes to the emerging anthropological literature on care by thematising the role of the state as carer-in-chief. Experiences such as that of Lázaro, the protagonist of the article, demonstrate the central paradox of care as a state project—one that receives its most extreme expression in the totalising project of revolutionary state socialism—namely, the contradiction between the particularistic, affective, and aesthetic character of care and the generalising and neutralising rational order of the state mechanisms charged with delivering it. Drawing on the ritual and cosmological template of Afro-Cuban espiritismo, Lázaro effectively solves this paradox by supplementing his relationship with state structures with an intricate, ever-evolving, and deeply personal relationship with spirits. The upshot is Lázaro’s remarkable sense of inner conviction in the efficacy of state bureaucracy, underpinned by the aesthetics of care that spiritsit practice provides.


Author(s):  
G. Kanato Chophy

The Konyak Nagas who inhabit the state of Nagaland in Northeast India have generated considerable anthropological interests since the colonial period. This eastern Naga tribe was mentioned in several colonial reports, but they came into prominence in anthropological literature, following Fürer-Haimendorf’s ethnographic monograph The Naked Nagas: Head-hunters of Assam in Peace and War. Fürer-Haimendorf had conducted fieldwork in Wakching village in the present Mon district between 1936 and 1937, setting off a new genre of ethnographic writing on the Naga tribes. Sifting through Fürer-Haimendorf’s writings, this article attempts a critical analysis of Konyak society and culture in light of recent developments in ethnographic studies. As argued, the Konyak Nagas are far removed from the colonial representations, but they still suffer from exotic imageries in the popular imagination that, in turn, has influenced ethnographic works. This article reflexively analyzes the Konyak Naga ethnography against the backdrop of a rapid sociocultural change facing the community.


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