The Mecha that therefore we are (not): an eco-phenomenological reading of Neon Genesis Evangelion

Nikolas Rose

Japanese anime is a pervasive part of that country’s culture, and is a medium rather than a genre, often dealing in far more adult themes, ideas, and storylines than are typically associated with American animation. In this paper I will argue that anime both represents and reimagines the known historical narrative in a way that resonates with contemporary audiences. To do this, I will look at two shows, Peacemaker Kurogane and Rurouni Kenshin, both of which premiered in the late 1990s. This decade was a period of domestic and economic unrest for Japan, and themes relevant to the viewers of this era abound in these anime. First, though, it is important to provide some historical and political context in order to better understand the events, people, and thought processes of the Meiji Restoration. This will allow me to better explain and analyze their portrayal. The late 1860s were a tumultuous time for Japan. This period of Japanese history, known as the Meiji Restoration, was a huge turning point for the country: it opened the nation to foreign trade, customs, and industry; it saw the end of a 260-year-old regime; and it had a lasting effect on the Japanese consciousness. The name ‘Meiji Restoration’ simply refers to a restructuring of government power, but that is perhaps an oversimplification of the military conflicts and political disputes that characterized the period (Reischauer, Story 95). The events of the Meiji Restoration were unique in the progression of Japanese history, and those events and their perpetrators have left an indelible mark on Japanese society. These people and events can be seen in media as varied as movies, dramas, novels, manga, and anime; however, as I must limit my scope, this paper will focus solely on anime and how Restoration-era people, events, and themes are portrayed.

Reviewed by: Descartes and the Passionate Mind Sean Greenberg Deborah J. Brown . Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 231. Cloth, $85.00. In the past two decades, Descartes's last work, The Passions of the Soul, has received considerable attention from Descartes scholars. In the first English-language monograph on the Passions, Deborah Brown mounts a case for the work's philosophical significance. Brown takes Descartes's treatment of the passions to extend the discussion of the mind-body union initiated in the Sixth Meditation, and in her book seeks "to show that it is the passions more than any other modes of mind that are fundamental to our experience of unity, and to show why that experience is necessary to our practical and theoretical enterprises, insofar as these depend on the co-operation of the body" (7). Brown also claims that "the value of the 'little treatise' [the Passions] extends beyond the narrow topic of the passions and bears upon a proper understanding of Descartes's whole thought" (10). [End Page 499] In the first two chapters of the book, Brown puts the Passions in historical context and thereby establishes her book's interpretive framework. In chapter one, she locates the Passions in relation to Descartes's writings. She naturally begins by considering Descartes's correspondence with Princess Elizabeth, since his sustained reflection on the passions began in this correspondence. Brown suggests that the Passions may be seen as a kind of response to Elizabeth's famous questions about Cartesian dualism, and claims that "the search for congruence between reason and passion"—a recurring theme of the correspondence with Elizabeth—"is the overarching theme of the Passions, and the one that unifies it" (13). She concludes the chapter by advancing the interesting interpretive hypothesis that the Passions "complements the Meditations and extends its project into the practical realm" (27). In chapter two, Brown succinctly and usefully locates the Passions in the context of related work by Descartes's predecessors and contemporaries, examining a range of texts from both the medical and philosophical traditions. According to Brown, Descartes's approach to the passions is distinctive because it reflects the "unitary" conceptions of mind and body that Descartes derives from his metaphysics. The remainder of the book divides into two parts: chapters 3–5 treat theoretical issues about the passions, while chapters 6–8 treat practical issues. In chapters 3–5, Brown examines, in turn, the function of the passions in promoting the survival of the embodied mind, their intentionality and ontological status, advancing distinctive positions on all these topics. The discussion of the function of the passions in chapter three is the most interesting and novel interpretive contribution of this part of the book. Brown argues that the passions are functionally related to, although distinct from, sensations: her suggestion seems to be that sensations give the embodied mind information, and passions somehow respond to that information in order to motivate action. While Brown is absolutely right to emphasize the motivational function of the passions, her interpretation of their function is somewhat underdeveloped, and could be strengthened with more attention to the relation between sensations and the passions, on the one hand, and the passions and the will, on the other. In chapters 6–8, Brown considers themes in Descartes's Passions and related writings that have received relatively little scholarly attention: the role of the passions of wonder and love in promoting and sustaining the search for knowledge, including self-knowledge, the relation between the passions and self-mastery, and the place of the passions in the virtuous life. Although Brown's discussion in these chapters is very imaginative—her comparison between Descartes's and Machiavelli's conceptions of virtue in chapter eight is particularly intriguing—she does not make an especially convincing case for the depth or significance of Descartes's thinking about issues in moral psychology, which is somewhat piecemeal. Brown's book is historically and philosophically rich and provocative. Her discussion in chapters 3–5 deftly illustrates the way in which attention to the Passions helps to shed a new light on long-standing questions in the interpretation of...

Fig. 1: "Xiao Ming (little Ming) and xiao meng (little sprout/cutie)", satirical take on a popular Chinese textbook character. Shared online Introduction: Cuteness, Online Vernaculars, and Digital FolkloreThis short essay presents some preliminary materials for a discussion of the social circulation of contemporary Chinese vernacular terms among digital media users. In particular, I present the word meng (萌, literally "sprout", recently adopted as a slang term for "cute") as a case in point for a contextual analysis of elements of digital folklore in their transcultural flows, local appropriations, and social practices of signification. One among many other neologisms that enter Mandarin Chinese from seemingly nowhere and gain a widespread popularity in everyday online and offline linguistic practices, meng belongs to a specific genealogy of Japanese animation fansubbing communities, and owes its rapid popularisation to its adaptation to local contexts in different syntactic forms. The resulting inclusion of meng in the changing repertoire of wangluo liuxing ciyu ("words popular on the Internet")—the online vernacular common among Chinese Internet users which is often the target of semantic or structural analyses—is in fact just the last step of processes of networked production and social signification happening across digital media and online platforms.As an anthropologist of media use, I aim to advance the thesis that, in the context of widespread access to digital media, vernacular terms popularised across online platforms and making their way into everyday linguistic interactions are not necessarily the epiphenomena of subcultural formations, nor can they be simply seen as imported aesthetics, or understood through semantic analyses. Rather, “words popular on the Internet” must be understood as part of a local digital folklore, the open repertoire of vernacular content resulting from the daily interaction of users and digital technologies (Lialina & Espenschied 9) in a complex and situated media ecology (Fuller). I argue that the difference between these two approaches is the same passing between a classical structural understanding of signification proposed by Lévi-Strauss and the counter-Copernican revolution proposed by Latour’s quasi-objects proliferating in collectives of actors. Are incredibly pervasive terms like meng actually devoid of meaning, floating signifiers enabling the very possibility of signification? Or are they rather more useful when understood as both signifiers and signifieds, quasi-objects tracing networks and leading to collectives of other hybrids and practices?The materials and observations presented in this essay are part of the data collected for my PhD research on Chinese digital folklore, a study grounded on both ethnographic and archaeological methods. The ethnographic part of my project consists of in-depth interviews, small talk and participant observation of users on several Chinese online platforms such as AcFun, Baidu Tieba, Douban, Sina Weibo and WeChat (Hine). The archaeological part, on the other hand, focuses on the sampling of user-generated content from individual feeds and histories of these online platforms, an approach closer to the user-focused Internet archaeology of Nicholson than to the media archaeology of Parikka. My choice of discussing the term meng as an example is motivated by its pervasiveness in everyday interactions in China, and is supported by my informants identifying it as one of the most popular vernacular terms originating in online interaction. Moreover, as a rather new term jostling its way through the crowded semantic spectrum of cuteness, meng is a good example of the minor aesthetic concepts identified by Ngai as pivotal for judgments of taste in contemporary consumer societies (812). If, as in the words of one of my informants, meng "just means 'cute'," why did it end up on Coca-Cola bottle labels which were then featured in humorous self-portraits with perplexed cats? Fig. 2: "Meng zhu" (Cute leader, play on word on homophone “alliance leader”) special edition Coca-Cola bottle with cat, uploaded on Douban image gallery. Screenshot by the author Cuteness after JapanContemporary Japan is often portrayed as the land of cuteness. Academic explanations of the Japanese fascination with the cute, neotenic and miniaturised abound, tackling the topic from the origins of cute aesthetics in Japanese folkloric characters (Occhi) and their reappearance in commercial phenomena such as Pokémon (Allison), to the role of cuteness as gender performance and normativity (Burdelski & Mitsuhashi) and the "spectacle of kawaii" (Yano 681) as a trans-national strategy of cultural soft power (683). Although the export and localisation of Japanese cultural products across and beyond Asia has been widely documented (Iwabuchi), the discussion has often remained at the level of specific products (comics, TV series, games). Less frequently explored are the repertoires of recontextualised samples, snippets and terms that local audiences piece together after the localisation and consumption of these transnational cultural products. In light of this, is it the case that "the very aesthetic and sensibility that seems to dwell in the playful, the girlish, the infantilized, and the inevitably sexualized" are inevitably adopted after the "widespread distribution and consumption of Japanese cute goods and aesthetics to other parts of the industrial world" (Yano 683)? Or is it rather the case that language precedes aesthetics, and that terms end up reconfigured according to the local discursive contexts in ongoing dialogic and situated negotiations? In other words, what happens when the Japanese word moe (萌え), a slang term "originally referring to the fictional desire for characters of comics, anime, and games or for pop idols” (Azuma 48) is read in its Mandarin Chinese pronunciation meng by amateur translators of anime and manga, picked up by audiences of video streaming websites, and popularised on discussion boards and other online platforms? On a broader level, this is a question of how the vocabularies of specialised fan cultures mutate when they move across language barriers on the vectors of digital media and amateur translations. While in Japanese otaku culture moe indicates a very specific, physically arousing form of aesthetic appreciation that is proper to a devote fan (Azuma 57), the appropriation of the (originally Chinese) logograph by the audiences of dongman (animation and comics) products in Mainland China results in the general propagation of meng as a way of saying 'cute' slightly more fashionable and hip than the regular Mandarin word ke'ai. Does this impact on the semantics or the aesthetics of cuteness in China? These questions have not been ignored by researchers; Chinese academics in particular, who have a first-hand experience of the unpredictable moods of vernacular terms circulating from digital media user cultures to everyday life interactions, appear concerned with finding linguistic explanations or establishing predictors for these rogue terms that seem to ignore lexical rules and traditional etymologies. Liu, for example, tries to explain the popularity of this particular term through Dawkins' neo-Darwinian theorisation of memes as units of cultural transmission, identifying in meng the evolutionary advantages of shortness and memorisability. As simplistic treatments of language, this sort of explanations does not account for the persistence of various other ways of describing general and specific kinds of cuteness in Mandarin Chinese, such as ke'ai, dia or sajiao, as described by Zhang & Kramarae (767). On the other hand, most of the Chinese language research about meng at least acknowledges how the word appears under the sign of a specific media ecology: Japanese comics and animation (dongman) translated and shared online by fan communities, Japanese videogames and movies widely consumed by Chinese young audiences, and the popularisation of Internet access and media literacy across China. It is in this context that this and other neologisms "continuously end up in the latest years' charts of most popular words" (Bai 28, translation by the author), as vernacular Mandarin integrates words from digital media user cultures and online platforms. Similar comparative analyses also recognise that "words move faster than culture" (Huang 15, translation by the author), and that it is now young Chinese digital media users who negotiate their understanding of meng, regardless of the implications of the Japanese moe culture and its aesthetic canons (16). According to Huang, this process indicates on the one hand the openness and curiosity of Chinese youth for Japanese culture, and on the other "the 'borrowist' tendency of the language of Internet culture" (18). It is precisely the speed and the carefree ‘borrowist’ attitude with which these terms are adopted, negotiated and transformed across online platforms which makes it questionable to inscribe them in the classic relationship of generational resistance such as the one that Moore proposes in his treatment of ku, the Chinese word for 'cool' described as the "verbal icon of a youth rebellion that promises to transform some of the older generation's most enduring cultural values" (357). As argued in the following section, meng is definitely not the evolutionary winner in a neo-Darwinian lexical competition between Chinese words, nor occupies a clear role in the semantics of cuteness, nor is it simply deployed as an iconic and rebellious signifier against the cultural values of a previous generation. Rather, after reaching Chinese digital media audiences along the "global wink of pink globalization" (Yano 684) of Japanese animation, comics, movies and videogames, this specific subcultural term diffracts along the vectors of the local media ecology. Special

This thesis focuses on the ontological status of the mind according to various interpretative traditions of Spinoza scholarship and Indo-Tibetan Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy. It compares two texts: Ethics by Spinoza (1632-1677) and The Way of the Bodhisattva by Śāntideva (c. 7-8th century). I argue against the materialist interpretation of Spinoza on the basis that it reduces his concept of monism to extension and mistakenly frames Spinoza’s insights in terms of Cartesian rationality. I then explain Śāntideva’s non-dual concept of mind as the middle between the extremes of nihilism and essentialism, and compare these to the materialist interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind as non-existent, and the non-materialist view that the essence of the mind is basic self-assertion (conatus). I conclude that for Spinoza the mind exists, whereas for Śāntideva the mind is beyond concepts of existence and non-existence. Chapter 1: Spinoza’s concept of mind The concept of monism describes reality as one substance with infinite attributes, which human beings encounter as thought or extension, through the modes of individual minds and bodies respectively. For strict materialists, only extended modes actually exist and the concept of the mind is correlated with changes in the body, such as neural activity, or with the conceivability of the order of nature. I argue that despite rejecting Descartes’ concept of mental substance, materialists have transferred the dualism between intellect and feeling to their interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of mind. The non-materialist interpretation of Spinoza such as that of Deleuze, attends to the distinction between essence and existence, and describes the mind as inherently existing to the extent that it participates in substance. For panpsychists, singular minds exist as subjects striving for existence while immersed in the influences of nature. Chapter two: The Mahāyāna Buddhist Concept of Mind Śāntideva refutes the views of earlier Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools in the famous Wisdom chapter of The Way of the Bodhisattva. Śāntideva argues that the mind is beyond the concepts of existence and non-existence using Nāgārjuna’s (c.1-2nd century) view of relative and ultimate truth and Dharmakīrti’s (c. 5th century) logic of valid cognition. The view of selflessness describes the mind as empty: it appears relatively, but ultimately it does not exist as an independent, permanent thing. It is an ephemeral gathering together of the five aggregates (skandha), which describe the interconnectedness of thoughts, feelings and dispositions of the mind and body. Chapter three: A comparison of the monist and non-dualist concepts of mind In this chapter I compare Spinoza’s monism and Śāntideva’s non-dualism and I argue that for Spinoza, the mind exists as “basic self-assertion” whereas Śāntideva presents the view of “selflessness”, which is distinct from a view of nihilism. I recognise that although the cultural and historical contexts are very different there are striking similarities in the structure of Spinoza’s and Śāntideva’s theories, including the relationship between the mind and body, thoughts and feelings, and the interconnectedness with nature.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReportsFirst Known Tibia of an Early Javanese Hominid1Shuji Matsu’ura, Megumi Kondo, Fachroel Aziz, Sudijono, Shuichiro Narasaki, and Naotune WatanabeShuji Matsu’uraDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author , Megumi KondoDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author , Fachroel AzizDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author , SudijonoDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author , Shuichiro NarasakiDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author , and Naotune WatanabeDepartment of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99 Search for more articles by this author Department of Human Biological Studies, Faculty of Human Life and Environmental Science, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo 112‐8610, Japan (Matsu’ura and Kondo)/Geological Research and Development Centre, Bandung 40122, Indonesia (Aziz and Sudijono)/Department of Anthropology, Gunma Museum of Natural History, Gunma 370‐2345, Japan (Narasaki) / University of Tokyo, Tokyo 113‐0033, Japan (Watanabe). 15 iv 99PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 41, Number 2April 2000 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/300136 Views: 50Total views on this site Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Qian Wang, Phillip V. Tobias An old species and a new frontier: Some thoughts on the taxonomy of Homo erectus, Anthropological Review 64 (Jun 2001): 9–20.https://doi.org/10.18778/1898-6773.64.01Shuji Matsu’ura Toward the resolution of controversial chronologies for the World Heritage Site of Sangiran : Dating the first appearance of Homo erectus in the island of Java, The Quaternary Research (Daiyonki-Kenkyu) 61, no.11 (Mar 2022): 1–25.https://doi.org/10.4116/jaqua.61.2108KAREN L. BAAB, YAHDI ZAIM Global and local perspectives on cranial shape variation in Indonesian Homo erectus, Anthropological Science 125, no.22 (Jan 2017): 67–83.https://doi.org/10.1537/ase.170413Erick Setiyabudi, Akio Takahashi, Yosuke Kaifu First Certain Fossil Record of Orlitia borneensis (Testudines: Geoemydidae) from the Pleistocene of Central Java, Indonesia, Current Herpetology 35, no.22 (Aug 2016): 75–82.https://doi.org/10.5358/hsj.35.75Liora Kolska Horwitz, Patricia Smith, Marina Faerman, Elisabetta Boaretto, Irina Segal The application of biometry and LA-ICP-MS to provenance isolated bones: a study of hominin remains from Oumm Qatafa Cave, Judean Desert, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 3, no.33 (Mar 2011): 245–262.https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-011-0056-1Yousuke Kaifu, Yahdi Zaim, Hisao Baba, Iwan Kurniawan, Daisuke Kubo, Yan Rizal, Johan Arif, Fachroel Aziz New reconstruction and morphological description of a Homo erectus cranium: Skull IX (Tjg-1993.05) from Sangiran, Central Java, Journal of Human Evolution 61, no.33 (Sep 2011): 270–294.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.04.002Karen L. Baab Cranial Shape in Asian Homo erectus: Geographic, Anagenetic, and Size-Related Variation, (Jul 2010): 57–79.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9094-2_6Sheela Athreya Patterning of geographic variation in Middle Pleistocene Homo frontal bone morphology, Journal of Human Evolution 50, no.66 (Jun 2006): 627–643.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2005.11.005Samuel Márquez, Kenneth Mowbray, G J Sawyer, Teuku Jacob, Adam Silvers New fossil hominid calvaria from Indonesia-Sambungmacan 3, The Anatomical Record 262, no.44 (Feb 2001): 344–368.https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.1046Eric Delson, Katerina Harvati, David Reddy, Leslie F. Marcus, Kenneth Mowbray, G. J. Sawyer, Teuku Jacob, Samuel Márquez The Sambungmacan 3 Homo erectus calvaria: A comparative morphometric and morphological analysis, The Anatomical Record 262, no.44 (Feb 2001): 380–397.https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.1048

P ublic support for U.S. federal expenditures for basic research gained momentum with the science and technology breakthroughs that contributed to the Allies' victory in World War II. After World War II, the Korean and Cold Wars concentrated research appropriations in the Department of Defense (DOD). DOD research expenditures were massive from 1950 to 1990. They included not only direct investments in weapons and intelligence systems but support of the underlying science, centered in physical sciences and engineering. What is less well remembered today is that DOD's basic research investments were broadly based, ranging far beyond the physical sciences and engineering into the life and social sciences. Through its service research offices and the Advanced Research Projects agencies, DOD also fostered interdisciplinary research in promising new areas, such as computation, and developed new modes for the performance of research, as in university materials research laboratories. The large investment in the physical sciences also contributed indirectly to medical science and health care, giving rise to many technologies used today. The life sciences now account for more than 50 percent of U.S. federal investment in basic research. Biomedical research funding has followed a pattern of steady significant growth over four decades, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have slowly come to dominate that funding. Today's strong federal support for the life sciences is warranted, because biomedical research is on the cusp of a revolution in preventative medicine and treatment. Nevertheless, today's overall research budget is increasingly out of balance. Federal funding of many fields in the physical sciences and engineering is down substantially since 1993 (9 to 36% in real terms in fields such as chemistry, physics, and electrical and chemical engineering). This loss, if continued, will imperil advances in these disciplines and endanger the continued flow of valuable discoveries and technologies that have been important to biomedical research and health care. National science and technology (S&T) policy over the past four decades has largely been led by physical scientists who first gained national experience in World War II. They crafted policies for broad investment in basic research and infrastructure, including the life sciences. As we enter the 21st century, biological scientists must assume broader leadership responsibilities in S&T policy, and they must speak out about the importance of support for all disciplines, including the physical sciences and engineering. NIH's Harold Varmus and the National Science Foundation's Rita Colwell recognize the imbalance in the current federal research portfolio and have begun advocating increased investment in all areas of research. Their leadership is to be commended, but it is not enough. Government, organizations, institutions, and industry can and should do more to bolster all basic research. NIH must set the example by much more broadly supporting innovative interdisciplinary research embracing all science, just as DOD did when it was the prime funder of R&D. Some of this has already begun in NIH's cross-institute bioengineering initiative and in prospective increased NIH support of information technology for biocomputation. Similar initiatives should be launched in other areas of the physical sciences and in the social and behavioral sciences. Funding for these initiatives should become a much larger percentage of NIH's overall expenditures. The life science professional societies must speak broadly for basic research and not just argue their own disciplinary cases. Disease advocacy groups must also articulate the case for the physical sciences in their work with the public and before Congress. University leaders and corporate executives must make the case for investment in all research disciplines. Most of all, biologists in the laboratory—working scientists and their students—need to appreciate that their research rests on the legacy not only of the life sciences but also the physical and other sciences. Today's life scientists and the next generation they are training must be the national leaders of the future who will increasingly guide all of U.S. basic research policy in the 21st century.

Apesar da crítica à concepção cartesiana do ser humano, faltam modelos teórico-conceituais que superaram suas limitações, a despeito do destaque dado à integralidade no Brasil. A base filosófica que fundamenta as abordagens dominantes é implícita, até nos modelos orientais importados como nas medicinas tradicionais e Práticas Integrativas Complementares (PICs) que, a partir de 2006, são promovidas no SUS pela Política Nacional das Práticas Integrativas Complementares e portarias. Descontextualizadas, as adaptações e criações de novas modalidades de PICs orientais se desfiguram a partir de interesses comerciais e desconhecimento de seu histórico. A integralidade é perdida, pois a PIC é fragmentada e isolada no modelo biomédico mecanicista e biologicista. Este artigo objetiva apresentar as premissas filosóficas indianas dos tantras em seu contexto histórico, como fundamento para o Ayurveda, e as práticas contemplativas que visam o desenvolvimento espiritual. Sua breve contextualização baseia-se nas análises acadêmicas de textos históricos em sânscrito, como também de autores e mestres de tradições espirituais asiáticos e ocidentais. Os conceitos de mente, corpo, awareness e energia integram esta abordagem não dual, onde predomina a imanência. Revelam uma compreensão da natureza humana integrada com o universo de modo complexo e dinâmico, desenvolvida e pesquisada ao longo de milhares de anos.

EU plans to boost research

In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.

In contemporary debates about the pros and cons of digital humanities (DH), there are certain interesting echoes of the famous ``two cultures debate'' – the one started by C.P. Snow in a lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, and followed up by another Cambridge lecture in 1962 by F.R. Leavis. Persons with a background in the arts had, Snow argued, a negative attitude toward the natural/technological sciences which made them unwilling to believe in the good of scientific and technological progress. Countering Snow's lecture, F.R. Leavis claimed that Snow's technological enthusiasm left no room for the more contemplative values that characterize the humanities. The ``two cultures'' debate has been with us ever since. In its current form, the ``two cultures'' controversy concerns relations between digital media and changing cultural interactions. Making it possible to bridge the gap between the ``two cultures'' by integrating quantitative methods into core humanities research, the new media influence both intellectual frameworks for humanities scholarship, and practices of translation, interpretation and mediatisation in relation to cultural encounters. In this article, I hope, by means of revisiting this old debate, to clarify some of the underlying issues.

Editorial

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

In the five years since its inception, HFSP Journal has made great progress. The journal has established itself as a well-regarded quarterly, publishing cutting-edge research at the interface of life and other advanced sciences. It gained its first impact factor last summer—an impressive 1.786—reflecting a very high standard of research published in the inaugural volumes. The paper of Riedel-Kruse et al. (2007), “How molecular motors shape the flagellar beat” and the study of Amitai et al. (2007), “Latent evolutionary potentials under the neutral mutational drift of an enzyme” are but two highlights among many. Now the journal is taking another step forward. In 2011, HFSP Journal will become Frontiers in Life Science and will be published by Taylor & Francis. After the current issue, Human Frontier Science Program will no longer manage the journal. The editor-in-chief, however, will continue to have complete control over editorial policy. What differences will you see? First, the journal will move to Taylor & Francis’ InformaWorld platform, where articles will be published in PDF and HTML and in advance of the printed issue whenever possible. Online files of the journal’s first four volumes will transfer across to InformaWorld and readers will benefit from sophisticated tools such as RSS content feeds and social bookmarks to enable easy linking to blogs and reference management platforms. Authors will still be able to pay for papers to become open access on publication. And the journal will continue to appear in both printed and online form. For the immediate future, submissions should be directed to the editorial manager (http://www.editorialmanager.com/hfspj). Later in the year, they will transfer to a dedicated ScholarOne Manuscripts site. We will contact authors nearer the time to explain how this will work. The Taylor & Francis Group has a long tradition of publishing in life science. Garland Science’s Molecular Biology of the Cell, now in its fourth edition, has been a phenomenally popular text. It forms part of an extensive book program, which is complemented by research journals including Critical Reviews in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Molecular Membrane Biology, Xenobiotica, Animal Biotechnology, Growth Factors, Microcirculation, Biocatalysis and Biotransformation, Critical Reviews in Microbiology, Artificial Cells, Blood Substitutes and Biotechnology, Food Biotechnology, and Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids.

Research Article| October 01 1995 Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America Annalee Newitz Annalee Newitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1995) 49 (1): 2–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213488 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Annalee Newitz; Magical Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America. Film Quarterly 1 October 1995; 49 (1): 2–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213488 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1995 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.