Shamans, Bureaucrats, and Their Cosmologies: Local Religious Organisations in Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region

Over the course of the last 18 years, shamans in Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region have started to register “local religious organizations”. This development has transformed shamanism itself whilst also forcing the Ministry of Justice to articulate whether shamanism could be considered a religion. The article describes this process as an interactive loop: the classifiable (shamans) responds to the process of classification (state registration) and then changes that classification. The study hinges on two findings. First, the differences in the structure of shamanic organizations lead them to create fundamentally different ways of describing the world (classification systems). Secondly, some of these classifications align more closely with the language of the state. The author builds on the “grid and group” model by Mary Douglas, which is subsequently augmented with conceptual insights from Bernstein and Collins. The model makes it possible to highlight three types of organizations that respond differently to the language of state classification. The study is based on empirical data (40 interviews and participant observation) collected by the author during an expedition to Buryatia and the Irkutsk Region between December 2019 and January 2020.

This is My Voice on T: Synthetic Testosterone, DIY Surveillance, and Transnormative Masculinity

How have biomedical innovation, regulation, and distribution of pharmaceutical testosterone prescribed to trans men created new forms of medical, community, and individual surveillance of masculinity and masculinization? Our systematic analysis of more than one hundred trans men’s testosterone vlogs provides evidence for the production (and consumption) and reproduction of a very narrow set of hegemonic scripts about what a male body is, how it is achieved, and what it means to become a man. We find in this medium, multiple overlapping agents of surveillance: the state, the medical–industrial complex, the interactive loop between ourselves and our screens, the videographer and the trans man, the viewer and watched, hegemonic masculinity and its internalizations. We offer a critical feminist reading of the way that surveillance technologies produce a particular type of transmasculine subject with consequences for cultural understandings of gender nonconformity.

Pre-linguistic infants employ complex communicative loops to engage mothers in social exchanges and repair interaction ruptures

Language has long been identified as a powerful communicative tool among humans. Yet, pre-linguistic communication, which is common in many species, is also used by human infants prior to the acquisition of language. The potential communicational value of pre-linguistic vocal interactions between human infants and mothers has been studied in the past decades. With 120 dyads (mothers and three- or six-month-old infants), we used the classical Still Face Paradigm (SFP) in which mothers interact freely with their infants, then refrain from communication (Still Face, SF), and finally resume play. We employed innovative automated techniques to measure infant and maternal vocalization and pause, and dyadic parameters (infant response to mother, joint silence and overlap) and the emotional component of Infant Directed Speech (e-IDS) throughout the interaction. We showed that: (i) during the initial free play mothers use longer vocalizations and more e-IDS when they interact with older infants and (ii) infant boys exhibit longer vocalizations and shorter pauses than girls. (iii) During the SF and reunion phases, infants show marked and sustained changes in vocalizations but their mothers do not and (iv) mother–infant dyadic parameters increase in the reunion phase. Our quantitative results show that infants, from the age of three months, actively participate to restore the interactive loop after communicative ruptures long before vocalizations show clear linguistic meaning. Thus, auditory signals provide from early in life a channel by which infants co-create interactions, enhancing the mother–infant bond.

Concluding Remarks

The procedure and steps of petroleum resource assessment involve a learning process that is characterized by an interactive loop between geological and statistical models and their feedback mechanisms. Geological models represent natural populations and are the basic units for petroleum resource evaluation. Statistical models include the superpopulation, finite population, and discovery process models that may be used for estimating the distributions for pool size and number of pools, and can be estimated from somewhat biased exploration data. Methods for assessing petroleum resources have been developed using different geological perspectives. Each of them can be applied to a specific case. When we consider using a particular method, the following aspects should be examined: • Types of data required—Some methods can only incorporate certain types of data; others can incorporate all data that are available. • Assumptions required—We must study what specific assumptions should be made and what role they play in the process of estimation. • Types of estimates—What types of estimates does the method provide (aggregate estimates vs. pool-size estimates)? Do the types of estimates fulfill our needs for economic analysis? • Feedback mechanisms—What types of feedback mechanism does the method offer? PETRIMES is based on a probabilistic framework that uses superpopulation and finite population concepts, discovery process models, and the optional use of lognormal distributions. The reasoning behind the application of discovery process models is that they offer the only known way to incorporate petroleum assessment fundamentals (i.e., realism) into the estimates. PETRIMES requires an exploration time series as basic input and can be applied to both mature and frontier petroleum resource evaluations.