Ambiguous Inheritance Research Articles

A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous elites of the colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe

Reviewed by: A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous elites of the colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe David Tavárez A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous elites of the colonial Americas By Sean F. McEnroe. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. Ample in scope, highly accessible and compellingly written, A Troubled Marriage delineates in broad strokes a hemispheric tableau of interconnections and conflicts that bound Indigenous local and regional elites to European colonizers between the early sixteenth and the middle years of the nineteenth century. The ties that bound privileged individuals together provides a central metaphor, which the author characterizes as "a marriage of sorts, but an unequal one" (230). The book's eight chapters make a solid case for regarding these entanglements as both inescapable and perpetually open to strategic changes. Chapter 1 sketches brief narratives of important early encounters, which range from Nahua noble visitors at the court of Charles V, to the well-known experiences of Gonzalo Guerrero, the Spanish soldier turned Maya warrior, Hernando Cortés' Yucatec Maya-Spanish translator Jerónimo de Aguilar, and the lengthy journey of the shipwrecked explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. This chapter also parses the travels of both Cherokee delegates and the Powhatan noblewoman better known as Pocahontas, and ends with the experiences of nineteenth-century Métis rebel Louis Riel. Chapter 2 then turns to important cases of European marriage alliances with Andean elites, and explores their political and social rationale. These examples include the marriage of Juan de Betanzos to Angelina Yupanqui, and the failure and renewal of marriage alliances made for a niece of Inca lord Tupac Amaru, Beatriz Clara Coya, whose second attempt ends in a union with Ignatius of Loyola's grand-nephew, Martín García de Loyola—an important marriage celebrated in a painting that merited further discussion. The chapter then addresses the life and ambiguous inheritance dynamics of eighteenth-century female elite doña Juliana Tico Chipana, and the quietly successful life of María Antonia Montes, an untitled woman who resided in an Indigenous quarter just beyond central Lima. Chapter 3 proposes an agile comparison of colonial educational institutions for Natives. This section deploys the experiences of Nahua statesman and Latinist don Antonio Valeriano—highly accomplished, but of commoner descent, as stressed by Nahua historian Chimalpahin—as an entry point into the mission of the first European school in the Americas, the Franciscan Colegio de Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. A sketch of this vibrant milieu is complemented by a discussion of Diego Muñoz Camargo's activities as historian of Tlaxcala, and an appraisal of Lima's College of San Francisco de Borja, alma mater not only of Inca leaders, but also of José Gabriel Condorcanqui, who as Tupac Amaru II led the most multitudinous rebellion in colonial Spanish America. The chapter closes with a glance at Harvard Indian College and Sequoya's Cherokee syllabary project. Chapter 4, devoted to Indigenous artists, opens with a painter named, unironically, after the renowned theologian and author Jean Gerson, a Nahua, Juan Gerson, who achieved his renown after completing the celebrated church frescoes in Tecamachalco. McEnroe then inspects Guaman Poma's Nueva corónica, a monumental and lavishly illustrated Andean chronicle that, nevertheless, may not be exactly "a grim graphic novel" (92), before turning to corn-paste Crucifix images stuffed with decommissioned documents, and to a revered image of the Virgin of Copacabana made by Native hands—those of Francisco Tito Yupanqui. Colonial religion is the focus of Chapter 5, which nimbly pivots from the Guadalupan visions of Juan Diego at Tepeyacac to the Nahua "child martyr" tales of sixteenth-century Tlaxcala, and then on to Diego Valadés' majestic 1579 rhetorical treatise and exaltation of Franciscan missionization, Rhetorica christiana, before landing further north with a précis about the life of Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the elegant English prose of Cherokee Christian convert Catharine Brown. Chapter 6, a brief meditation on urban planning, Indigenous presence in the regal cities of Lima and Mexico City, and the public spectacle of Corpus Christi, leads to two final chapters about conquest and conflict. Chapter 7 examines Indigenous alliances and client relations with European colonial actors through...

Joseph Priestley as an heir of Newton

ABSTRACTLike most Enlightenment philosophers, Priestley acknowledges his debt to Newton. However, despite his mentor’s prohibition against “making hypotheses”, in the 1770s, he embarked on a surprising metaphysical epic that led him, the theologian and scientist, to develop in his Disquisitions a bold system that articulated materialism, necessity and Socinianism. This synthesis constitutes the originality of a thinker who wanted to reapprehend science, metaphysics and theology together at the very moment when their dispersion seemed inevitable (and to give them an educational and political extension). It is based on a monistic ontology to which Priestley did not hesitate to give the unexpected name of materialism, at the risk of a number of misunderstandings, while he claims, much to the dismay of Reid, to closely follow the method of Newton. This paper will focus on the relation between Priestley and Newton’s ambiguous inheritance. What is Priestley’s “science” made of? What is its relationship to Newton and his “rules”, to mathematics, to the theory of language, to the so-called “analysis and synthesis method”, to Boscovich? How important is his claim for hypotheses and metaphysics? If Priestley indeed was a Newtonian, he surely was an unorthodox one.

New and not so new strategies in promoting integrity with particular reference to Africa

This article is focused on exploration not merely proposed developments in and refinements of the law and its administration, but the very significant role that financial intelligence can and should play in protecting our societies. It is the contention of the author that the intelligence community at large and in particular financial intelligence units have an important role to play in protecting our economies and ensuring confidence is maintained in our financial institutions and markets. In this article the author considers a number of issues pertinent to the advancement of integrity and in particular the interdiction of corruption to some degree from the perspective of Africa. The potential for Africa as a player in the world economy is enormous. So far, the ambiguous inheritance of rapacious empires and the turmoil of self-dealing elites in post-colonial times has successfully obscured and undermined this potential. Indeed, such has been the mismanagement, selfishness and importuning that many have grave doubts as to the ability of many states to achieve an ordered transition to what they could and should be. South Africa is perhaps the best example of a society that while avoiding the catastrophe that its recent past predicted, remains racked by corruption and mismanagement. That there is the will in many parts of the continent to further stability and security by addressing the cancer of corruption, the reality is that few have remained or been allowed to remain steadfast in their mission and all have been frustrated by political self-interest and lack of resources. The key might be education and inter-generational change as it has been in other parts of the world, but only an optimist would see this coming any time soon – there is too much vested interest inside and outside Africa in keeping things much as they are! The author focuses not so much on attempting to perfect the letter of the law, but rather on improving the ways in which we administer it.

Joan Hoff, A Faustian Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush: Dreams of Perfectability

Joan Hoff’s searing critique of American foreign policy from World War I to the War on Terror comes at a time when the Wilsonian legacy is attracting renewed interest. Different historians have chosen to emphasise different aspects of this legacy. Erez Manela has explored how antiimperialist intellectuals in Asia were empowered by the doctrine of self-determination during a global Wilsonian Moment, whereas David Kennedy has portrayed George W. Bush as Woodrow Wilson’s natural successor. Hoff, who has published widely on U.S. foreign relations and the American presidency, admits that a true characterisation of Wilsonian foreign policy is problematic. She resorts to a distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Wilsonianism: the former entails ‘spreading self-determination and free trade capitalism to the world through collective security arrangements’, while the latter indulges in unilateral interventionism. (10) In practice, this ambiguous inheritance has resulted in a unilateralist foreign policy tempered by occasional cooperation with other states.

Phylogenetic reconstruction and the identification of ancient polymorphism in the Bovini tribe (Bovidae, Bovinae).

BackgroundThe Bovinae subfamily incorporates an array of antelope, buffalo and cattle species. All of the members of this subfamily have diverged recently. Not surprisingly, a number of phylogenetic studies from molecular and morphological data have resulted in ambiguous trees and relationships amongst species, especially for Yak and Bison species. A partial phylogenetic reconstruction of 13 extant members of the Bovini tribe (Bovidae, Bovinae) from 15 complete or partially sequenced autosomal genes is presented.ResultsWe identified 3 distinct lineages after the Bovini split from the Boselaphini and Tragelaphini tribes, which has lead to the (1) Buffalo clade (Bubalus and Syncerus species) and a more recent divergence leading to the (2) Banteng, Gaur and Mithan and (3) Domestic cattle clades. A fourth lineage may also exist that leads to Bison and Yak. However, there was some ambiguity as to whether this was a divergence from the Banteng/Gaur/Mithan or the Domestic cattle clade. From an analysis of approximately 30,000 sites that were amplified in all species 133 sites were identified with ambiguous inheritance, in that all trees implied more than one mutation at the same site. Closer examination of these sites has identified that they are the result of ancient polymorphisms that have subsequently undergone lineage sorting in the Bovini tribe, of which 53 have remained polymorphic since Bos and Bison species last shared a common ancestor with Bubalus between 5–8 million years ago (MYA).ConclusionUncertainty arises in our phylogenetic reconstructions because many species in the Bovini diverged over a short period of time. It appears that a number of sites with ambiguous inheritance have been maintained in subsequent populations by chance (lineage sorting) and that they have contributed to an association between Yak and Domestic cattle and an unreliable phylogenetic reconstruction for the Bison/Yak clade. Interestingly, a number of these aberrant sites are in coding sections of the genome and their identification may have important implications for studying the neutral rate of mutation at nonsynonymous sites. The presence of these sites could help account for the apparent contradiction between levels of polymorphism and effective population size in domesticated cattle.

An ambiguous inheritance

An ambiguous inheritance

The complexity of path-based defeasible inheritance

Touretzky [22] proposed a formalism for nonmonotonic multiple inheritance reasoning which is sound in the presence of ambiguities and redundant links. We show that Touretzky's inheritance notion is NP-hard, and thus, provided P ≠ NP, computationally intractable. This result holds even when one only considers unambiguous, totally acyclic inheritance networks. A direct consequence of this result is that the conditioning strategy proposed by Touretzky to allow for fast parallel inference is also intractable. We also analyze the influence of various design choices made by Touretzky. We show that all versions of so-called downward inheritance, i.e., on-path or off-path preemption and skeptical or credulous reasoning, are intractable. However, on the positive side, tractability can be achieved when using upward inheritance. Finally, we consider the problem of determining what holds in all extensions of an ambiguous inheritance network. Without any preemption—corresponding to a very cautious form of inheritance—this problem is tractable, but when allowing even the most basic forms of preemption, it becomes intractable.