Cultural Ancestry Research Articles

THE ASTONISHING BEAUTY OF CHHAU MASK: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY ON THE TRADITIONAL FOLK ART OF CHARIDA VILLAGE OF PURULIA DISTRICT, WEST BENGAL

Bengal, a land of beauty and prosperity in its cultural ancestry. The tradition is enriched by diverse folk art of various tribes and ethnic groups creating the uniqueness. Music, dance have great importance for recreational, aesthetic and cultural aspect of the state. The cultural background, social value and structure, history, religion and mythological concept are also reflected by the traditional folk art. Different types of folk art are found in West Bengal. Among them, Patachitra and Madhubani are respectively the traditional style of painting, characterized by their mythological stories and intricate designs. The other folk arts with great traditional significance are the embroidery art locally called, Kantha and metal casting technique based Dokra. The Chhau Mask making art is one of them important traditional folk art, essential for the age old Chhau dance. The present paper is empirical and qualitative in nature, mainly focused on the traditional folk art of Chhau Mask, an integral part of Chhau dance, of Charida village, its making procedure and people associated with the mask making economy.

Headhunting and warfare in Austronesia: A phylogenetic comparative analysis

Headhunting – the practice of acquiring human heads for ritual purposes – was historically widespread around the world. We hypothesize that headhunting represented a cultural response to frequent inter-tribal warfare and served as a mechanism to train warriors ready to defend their community. The practice was effective since, first, it allowed verification of warrior quality based on performance in headhunting raids and, second, it offered a system of rewards for men to develop and refine warfare skills. We use phylogenetic comparative methods and ethnographic data to empirically investigate this hypothesis in a sample of preindustrial Austronesian societies. Headhunting turns out to be substantially more prevalent in societies exposed to frequent warfare, accounting for shared cultural ancestry and a host of potentially confounding characteristics. Furthermore, Bayesian estimation of correlated evolution models suggests that, consistent with our hypothesis, the adoption of headhunting typically followed increases in warfare frequency and the decline of this practice was preceded by reduced intergroup conflict.

Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations

Cross-national analyses test hypotheses about the drivers of variation in national outcomes. However, since nations are connected in various ways, such as via spatial proximity and shared cultural ancestry, cross-national analyses often violate assumptions of non-independence, inflating false positive rates. Here, we show that, despite being recognised as an important statistical pitfall for over 200 years, cross-national research in economics and psychology still does not sufficiently account for non-independence. In a review of the 100 highest-cited cross-national studies of economic development and values, we find that controls for non-independence are rare. When studies do control for non-independence, our simulations suggest that most commonly used methods are insufficient for reducing false positives in non-independent data. In reanalyses of twelve previous cross-national correlations, half of the estimates are compatible with no association after controlling for non-independence using global proximity matrices. We urge social scientists to sufficiently control for non-independence in cross-national research.

The network signature of constellation line figures.

In traditional astronomies across the world, groups of stars in the night sky were linked into constellations-symbolic representations rich in meaning and with practical roles. In some sky cultures, constellations are represented as line (or connect-the-dot) figures, which are spatial networks drawn over the fixed background of stars. We analyse 1802 line figures from 56 sky cultures spanning all continents, in terms of their network, spatial, and brightness features, and ask what associations exist between these visual features and culture type or sky region. First, an embedded map of constellations is learnt, to show clusters of line figures. We then form the network of constellations (as linked by their similarity), to study how similar cultures are by computing their assortativity (or homophily) over the network. Finally, we measure the diversity (or entropy) index for the set of constellations drawn per sky region. Our results show distinct types of line figures, and that many folk astronomies with oral traditions have widespread similarities in constellation design, which do not align with cultural ancestry. In a minority of sky regions, certain line designs appear universal, but this is not the norm: in the majority of sky regions, the line geometries are diverse.

Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy.

Understanding global variation in democratic outcomes is critical to efforts to promote and sustain democracy today. Here, we use data on the democratic status of 221 modern and historical nations stretching back up to 200 years to show that, particularly over the last 50 years, nations with shared linguistic and, more recently, religious ancestry have more similar democratic outcomes. We also find evidence that for most of the last 50 years the democratic trajectory of a nation can be predicted by the democratic status of its linguistic and, less clearly, religious relatives, years and even decades earlier. These results are broadly consistent across three democracy indicators (Polity 5, Vanhanen's Index of Democracy, and Freedom in the World) and are not explained by geographical proximity or current shared language or religion. Our findings suggest that deep cultural ancestry remains an important force shaping the fortunes of modern nations, at least in part because democratic norms, institutions, and the factors that support them are more likely to diffuse between close cultural relatives.

Stepping to the fore: The promotion of Irish dance in Australia

This article contributes to scant literature on Irish dance praxis in Australia by demonstrating how the confluence of global and local factors have permitted Irish dance in Australia to step to the fore. Irish step dance is a globally recognizable genre that has dispersed through, first, the migration of Irish people throughout the world and, more recently, through itinerant theatrical troupes. In Australia, a significant node of the Irish diaspora, Irish step dance has managed to achieve unusual prominence in a dance landscape that has traditionally been dominated by genres from within the Western concert dance canon. Drawing on both extant literature and ethnographic data, this article examines three threads from the narrative of Irish dance in Australia. First, the general choreographic landscape of the nation is described, showing that the preferences of Australian dance audiences have been shaped to privilege styles that are popular onstage and on-screen, with the resulting marginalization of culturally-specific genera. Second, localized effects of the global contagion instigated by the development of the stage show Riverdance are explored. Here, the domains of aesthetics and decisive marketing strategies are discussed, showing how engagement with Australian audiences was achieved. Finally, the article introduces an idiosyncratic localized influence, the children’s musical group The Wiggles, which was conceived independently but which also promoted interest and enthusiasm for Irish dance in Australia by engaging with young children and presenting propriety of Irish dance as available to all, regardless of cultural ancestry.

SOCIO-ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ORDER KNOWN AS CONSTITUTION [SCHEDULED CASTES] ORDER 1950 IN THE LIFE OF DALITS IN KERALA

Untouchables, depressed class people, Chandalas or politically known as Dalits and officially recognized as Scheduled Castes in India are historically placed in different religions. They share a common history of oppression, economic deprivations and denial of human rights. Though they belong to different religions, their common cultural ancestry is an undeniable reality. The Presidential Order known as Constitution [Scheduled Castes] order 1950 limits the Scheduled Caste Status only to such untouchable people who profess Hinduism, Sikhism or Buddhism. The order excludes Dalit Muslim and Dalit Christian from the ambit of Scheduled caste status. The article problematizes the historical and political contexts in which the exclusion of certain castes happened and the contemporary historical realities that necessitate the inclusion of Dailit Christians and Dalit Muslims into the Scheduled Caste List and how the denial aborts political and cultural unity of Dalits across different religions.

The cultural foundations of modern democracies.

National democracy is a rare thing in human history and its stability has long been tied to the cultural values of citizens. Yet it has not been established whether changing cultural values made modern democracy possible or whether those values were a response to democratic institutions. Here we combine longitudinal data and cohort information of nearly 500,000 individuals from 109 nations to track the co-evolution of democratic values and institutions over the last century. We find that cultural values of openness towards diversity predict a shift towards democracy and that nations with low institutional confidence are prone to political instability. In addition, the presence of democratic institutions did not predict any substantive changes in the measured cultural values. These results hold accounting for other factors, including gross domestic product per capita and non-independence between nations due to shared cultural ancestry. Cultural values lead to, rather than follow, the emergence of democracy. This indicates that current stable democracies will be under threat, should cultural values of openness to diversity and institutional confidence substantially decline.

Social Practice and Shared History, Not Social Scale, Structure Cross-Cultural Complexity in Kinship Systems.

Human populations display remarkable diversity in language and culture, but the variation is not without limit. At the population level, variation between societies may be structured by a range of macro‐evolutionary factors, including ecological and environmental resources, shared ancestry, spatial proximity, and covarying social practices. Kinship terminology systems are varying linguistic paradigms that denote familial social relationships of kin and non‐kin. Systems vary by the kinds of salient distinctions that are made (e.g., age, gender, generation) and the extent to which different kinds of kin are called by the same term. Here, we explore two kinds of explanations for an observed typology of kin terms for cousins. The first one derives the typology from a learning bottleneck linked to population size. This would lead to a correlation between community size and the type of kinship system. The second one derives it from a set of social practices, particularly marriage and transfer of resources that might shape kinship systems. Using a global ethnographic database of over a thousand societies, we show that marriage rules and shared linguistic affiliation have a significant influence on the type of kinship system found in a society. This remains true if we control for the effect of spatial proximity and cultural ancestry. By combining cognitive and historic approaches to this aspect of kinship, we suggest broader implications for the study of human social cognition in general.

Born to be an Entrepreneur? How Cultural Origin Affects Entrepreneurship

Persistent differences in entrepreneurial activity between regions and countries remain unexplained. This paper argues that cultural heritage is an important determinant. We exploit a quasi-experimental setting comparing entrepreneurial activities of individuals with different cultural ancestry from within Switzerland but who live in the same municipality today and are hence exposed to the same economic and institutional environment. We find that individuals with cultural origin on the German-speaking side of the Swiss language border found 20% more firms than their counterparts with cultural origin on the French-speaking side ─ no matter if they currently live in the German-speaking or French-speaking region. These newly founded firms are identical in terms of survival rate, industry composition, legal form, and firm size, independent of the cultural origin of firm founders. A model of entrepreneurial choice suggests that the empirical patterns of firm entry and performance are more likely driven by differences in risk aversion or preferences for entrepreneurship rather than by skill.

Deep cultural ancestry and human development indicators across nation states.

How historical connections, events and cultural proximity can influence human development is being increasingly recognized. One aspect of history that has only recently begun to be examined is deep cultural ancestry, i.e. the vertical relationships of descent between cultures, which can be represented by a phylogenetic tree of descent. Here, we test whether deep cultural ancestry predicts the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI) for 44 Eurasian countries, using language ancestry as a proxy for cultural relatedness and controlling for three additional factors—geographical proximity, religion and former communism. While cultural ancestry alone predicts HDI and its subcomponents (income, health and education indices), when geographical proximity is included only income and health indices remain significant and the effect is small. When communism and religion variables are included, cultural ancestry is no longer a significant predictor; communism significantly negatively predicts HDI, income and health indices, and Muslim percentage of the population significantly negatively predicts education index, although the latter result may not be robust. These findings indicate that geographical proximity and recent cultural history—especially communism—are more important than deep cultural factors in current human development and suggest the efficacy of modern policy initiatives is not tightly constrained by cultural ancestry.

Abstract IA11: Cancer patterns among US Latino subpopulations defined by country of origin

Abstract Latinos are the fastest growing minority ethnic group in the US and are predicted to account for ~25% of the US population by the year 2050. In spite of this, knowledge about cancer determinants and predictors of cancer outcomes in this population are lagging behind other racial/ethnic groups in the US. Importantly, most existing studies consider US Latinos as one group; however, in spite of the shared language and history, there is significant variability within this group in terms of cultural factors, genetic ancestry, and degree of assimilation to the US lifestyle. Lack of consideration of this heterogeneity may mask important cancer patterns within this population. Consideration of country of origin, using cancer registry data, might partially capture some of these indicators of heterogeneity, and may serve as a starting point to identify important differences among US Latinos. For example, there is emerging evidence that cancer incidence for some of the main cancer types differ across Latino subpopulations defined by country of origin. For several cancers, U.S.-born Latinos have higher cancer incidence than foreign-born Latinos, and Puerto Rican and Cuban Latinos seem to have higher incidence rates than Mexican Latinos. Similarly, differences can be observed across Latino subpopulations defined by country of origin in the distribution of age at diagnosis, sex, socioeconomic status, stage, tumor localization, and overall survival. These findings might be explained by the complex relationship between differences in the prevalence of cancer risk factors, both in the US and in the country of origin of foreign-born Latinos, genetic susceptibility, and access and attitudes towards health care. Elucidating these complex interactions will be critical to identify the most relevant cancer determinants and treatment strategies for US Latinos. Citation Format: Mariana C. Stern. Cancer patterns among US Latino subpopulations defined by country of origin. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Ninth AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2016 Sep 25-28; Fort Lauderdale, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2017;26(2 Suppl):Abstract nr IA11.

Menggapai Permainan Tradisional Anak Indonesia dalam Perangkat Berbasis Android

Play is a child's world, by playing the child will learn to interact, learn to share, emotion and hone motor skills that support the development of the child. Game in the era of information t echnology is a game that does not require a lot of movement and tend to release attachment to the neighborhood children and their parents. While traditional games children Indonesia offered Android-based devices today is still an application to introduce the history of the game and how to play. This app only provides information, has not been able to replace the benefits and functions of traditional games of Indonesian children the truth.Indonesian traditional games children a heritage, a legacy of the ancestors of Indonesia. So as to preserve the cultural ancestry as means of Indonesian children were able to preserve the culture of Indonesia. But now it has changed the cultural inheritance child's play. Culture plays a passive child, and let go of attachment to the child with the parents and the environment.The biggest challenge will be faced in the future is how to implement actual meaning for children to play in Android-based devices.

Cultural and Environmental Predictors of Pre-European Deforestation on Pacific Islands.

The varied islands of the Pacific provide an ideal natural experiment for studying the factors shaping human impact on the environment. Previous research into pre-European deforestation across the Pacific indicated a major effect of environment but did not account for cultural variation or control for dependencies in the data due to shared cultural ancestry and geographic proximity. The relative importance of environment and culture on Pacific deforestation and forest replacement and the extent to which environmental impact is constrained by cultural ancestry therefore remain unexplored. Here we use comparative phylogenetic methods to model the effect of nine ecological and two cultural variables on pre-European Pacific forest outcomes at 80 locations across 67 islands. We show that some but not all ecological features remain important predictors of forest outcomes after accounting for cultural covariates and non-independence in the data. Controlling for ecology, cultural variation in agricultural intensification predicts deforestation and forest replacement, and there is some evidence that land tenure norms predict forest replacement. These findings indicate that, alongside ecology, cultural factors also predict pre-European Pacific forest outcomes. Although forest outcomes covary with cultural ancestry, this effect disappears after controlling for geographic proximity and ecology. This suggests that forest outcomes were not tightly constrained by colonists’ cultural ancestry, but instead reflect a combination of ecological constraints and the short-term responses of each culture in the face of those constraints.

All Anglos are alike? A study of whinging Poms and bloody-minded Aussies

Cross-cultural service research is an important topic with a rich array of empirical evidence for differences in customer perceptions, attitudes and behaviours. However, the extant literature is almost exclusively focused on differences between cultures at each end of the diversity spectrum (most commonly East vs. West). Contemporary researchers have observed that existing studies fail to acknowledge the substantially greater levels of intra-cluster variation that exist. A cultural cluster is a group of countries that reflect values, attitudes and beliefs stemming from a common cultural ancestry. This seems surprising given the anecdotal evidence and stereotypes that are portrayed in popular culture, media and art. One area where intra-cluster variation may be evident is consumer complaint behaviour and in particular within the Anglo-cultural cluster in countries. A cultural cluster is a group of countries that reflect values, attitudes and beliefs stemming from a common cultural ancestry. The aim of this study is therefore to explore and elucidate the nature of differences in consumer complaint behaviour between cultures traditionally conceived and operationalised as identical. This study presents a qualitative study of 60 in-depth interviews with consumers in the United Kingdom and Australia and identifies differences in complaining styles, parental influence and the conceptualisation of complaining.

From Pre- to Post-Famine: Trends in Underweight Among North Korean Children, 1987-2012

IntroductionTo let all people eat rice with meat soup, as a common propaganda slogan has it, has been an objective of the leadership of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), also known as North Korea.1 Yet contrary to official proclamation, nutritional stress has lingered in North Korea ever since its foundation in 1948, which was brought about by the emerging Cold War (1945-1991). As a manifestation of food calamities, mean final height of North Korean men, taken as a proxy for nutritional and epidemiological stress in early life,2 merely stagnated for all decades of the Cold War.3,4 In stark contrast, contemporary South Korean men are by now the tallest in all of East Asia because of healthy and wealthy living conditions in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula.5Worst of all, by the 1990s, North Korea experienced a great famine.6,7 Massive starvation of North Koreans occurred with the downfall of socialism and the geopolitical disintegration of the Eastern Bloc. Food, fertilizers, and energy could no longer be afforded on the basis of world market prices. Lacking these necessary inputs, North Korea's economy collapsed in the 1990s.8 More important, in the previous Cold War era, the socialist government inefficiently focused on heavy industrialization and symbolic mammoth projects of marginal economic use in addition to overspending up to one-third of its budget on the military.9 This leftNorth Korea without comparative advantages in exports in the post-Cold War era to raise the levels of living and revive its economy.Though macroeconomic shocks and long-term strategic malinvestments are the underlying causes for North Korea's decline after the Cold War, the food crisis of the 1990s itself was triggered by two consecutive floods in 1995 and 1996 that devastated large parts of the country and evolved into a major famine.10 The floods in turn were a result of the El Nino weather anomaly at that time, although deforestation accelerated the crisis. However, by the early 2000s, North Korean living standards improved thanks to international assistance. In the early 1990s, North Korea joined the United Nations, and after the first floods in 1995, it officially appealed for aid. Ever since then, international food aid has been pouring into the DPRK, with peaks from 1997 to 2005 (Figure 1). Another important factor for North Korea's revitalization in the post-Cold War era was liberalization reforms. These were officially introduced in 2002 (July First Reforms) and led to a paradigmatic shift, including marketization and decentralization.11,12,13 Table 1 demonstrates that probably 78 percent of North Koreans were participating in the informal economy by the time they were interviewed from 2004 to 2005.This article investigates the trends in underweight of children in North Korea from 1987 to 2012 to explore how the nutritional status of the North Korean people developed in the critical decade of the 1990s and beyond. First and foremost, the starting point of this study is the year 1987, which is a prefamine period when North Korea was still integrated into the Eastern Bloc. The last year of observation is the post-famine year 2012, which is over a decade after the great famine of the 1990s. Hence, this study offers very rare evidence on the long-term development of North Korean biosocial living standards. Previous statistical analysis on North Korean child malnutrition focused on cross-sectional evidence during the peak of famine14,15 or after the famine16,17 as well as on the regional effects of the food crisis.18,19 What is more, this paper compares underweight rates of children in North Korea to that of their peers in South Korea by drawing on recently released statistics based on a nationally representative anthropometric survey carried out from 2003 to 2004. This is another intriguing comparison because both Koreas share the same genetic and cultural ancestry and were also not affected much by migration over the last centuries. …

Speaking the Language of Diversity: Spanish Fluency, White Ancestry, and Skin Color in the Distribution of Diversity Awards to Latinos

Two studies investigated the combined effects of cultural practices, ancestry, and phenotype on ethnic categorization and the distribution of resources to minorities. Perceivers formed impressions of Latino internship candidates who varied in Spanish language fluency, White/European ancestry, and skin color. Spanish fluency influenced the distribution of minority resources to all targets, but only influenced the Latino categorization of targets who had White/European ancestry. The effect of Spanish fluency on minority resource distribution was explained by the White/European target's Latino categorization and perceived commitment to minority communities. We discuss why factors beyond racial/ethnic categorization may matter in minority resource distribution decisions.

Cooking Up Consciousness

There is no doubt that the sciences of life and mind have progressed significantly since the appearance of William James's The Principles of Psychology in 1890. Indeed, despite the eclipse of James's philosophical school after the Second World War, pragmatism seems to be the modus operandi of the cognitive sciences - at least according to Jerry Fodor, the arch-Cartesian of our time. Nevertheless, many of the pragmatist insights about the nature of mind and consciousness are still unappreciated by mainstream scientists of the mind and brain. Though there are many affinities between pragmatism and new movements in contemporary theorizing about mentation, such as the enactive, embedded, embodied, and extended theories of mind, there is much work to be done when it comes to consciousness, as our Cartesian heritage still plagues our inquiries into what many consider to be the most familiar thing of all, our conscious lives.My aim here is to sketch a pragmatist view of consciousness and the science of it. Elsewhere, I have suggested an alternative metaphor for thinking about consciousness and its relation to the body and world (Solymosi 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2013a; and Solymosi and Shook 2013a and 2013b). Instead of viewing consciousness as digestion (as Alva Noe (2008) rightly sees as the orthodox view in cognitive science, well endorsed by John Searle (2004)) and to improve upon Noe's own suggestion, that consciousness is like dancing, I propose that we are better off thinking of consciousness as cooking.To elaborate this proposal, I first introduce neuropragmatism and preface my proposal with a pragmatist view of science and reconstruction. With that framework in hand, I briefly review the current status of the science of consciousness. From there, I turn specifically to two ways of viewing consciousness and cooking. The first draws from John Dewey's observation in his recently discovered book that our idiosyncratic cultural ancestry has created - one might say cooked up - the belief that consciousness is a noun, denoting substance, whereas we would be better off to use the adverb, consciously, or the gerund, minding. The second way of viewing consciousness that I present is to go through three metaphors of digestion, dancing, and cooking, in order to show that there are good evolutionary, social, and cultural reasons to conceive of consciousness - that is, conscious activity - as being more like cooking.1. Neuropragmatism, Reconstruction, and ScienceNeurophilosophical or neuroscientifically-informed pragmatism is an explicit continuation of the inquiries started by William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. This is not to say that pragmatists since the 1950s have entirely neglected cognitive science and neuroscience. Pragmatists like Mark Johnson and Jay Schulkin have been writing for many years on what I would now consider neuropragmatist themes. Philosophers of cognitive science, such as Teed Rockwell (2005) and Anthony Chemero (2009), have offered more recent perspectives that draw on some of the insights of Dewey and James. William Casebeer (2003) has utilized Dewey's ethical theory in his work on neuroethics. And David Franks (2010) has developed the new field of neurosociology by modifying Mead's work with contemporary neuroscientific findings, especially work being done on mirror neurons. Still others have developed neuroanthropology, the main tenets of which share strong affinities with the pragmatism of Dewey and Mead (see Lende and Downey 2012).Where neuropragmatism distinguishes itself from plain-old pragmatism is that neuropragmatism provides a framework for not just thinking about the nature of mentation - the process of mental living, both cognitively and noncognitively1 - but also a framework for dealing with the problems that neuroscientific advances can either resolve or bring about. That is, neuropragmatism advances the spirit of pragmatism by incorporating the data coming from the sciences of life and mind in order to better resolve the human problems with which we are already dealing or with which we will soon likely be dealing. …

Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages by Sanping Chen (review)

Reviewed by: Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages by Sanping Chen David James Griffiths Chen, Sanping , Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages (Encounters with Asia), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012; cloth; pp. 320; R.R.P. US$79.95, £52.00; ISBN 9780812243703. Sanping Chen's interesting and challenging collection - part linguistics, part cultural case studies - is clearly a labour of love and dedication. The obvious interest Chen has in challenging accepted norms is foregrounded from the start through both the initial foreword by Victor H. Mair and the jacket appraisal by Peter Golden of Rutgers University, which refers to the text as a 'useful corrective'. Without a network of existing support, Chen's status as an independent scholar throws into stark relief both the challenge he makes in 'correcting' existing historical interpretations of Sui and Tang China and the sheer effort required in doing so, evident by his painstaking literary, linguistic, and sociological analysis. Through six related and somewhat self-referential essays, Chen explores a series of subjects to peel back the Chinese 'veneer' of Tang dynasty culture, norms, language, and familial descent. He argues that far from the accepted standpoint, the Tang royal household was in fact 'barbarian' in origin, that Steppe, Altaic, and Iranic influences were pervasive throughout the Tang eras, that such influences were an 'open secret' forcing a backlash against the royal household and nobility by Han and Confucian traditionalists in society, and this led to further stratification and segregation at court and throughout the noble classes. The first essay, on the cultural ancestry and heritage of the Tuoba Steppe people in connection with their subsequent 'Sinotization' as the Tang dynasty, is the strongest of the collection. Chen deftly examines the mores of the royal household, such as language, kin relations, predilection for 'barbarian' interests such as riding, hunting, and the performing arts in the context of a few, offhand mentions of this heritage in various histories which previous scholars have not been able to fully explain. Indeed, the context of 'official history' - which in China would typically mean an authorised, Confucian and court-scholar Han version - gives Chen a single impetus in explaining why so few mentions of this heritage exist and why previous historians would underplay or try to explain away a connection between a supposedly native dynasty and a 'barbaric' people. Following the first essay on ancestry, Chen turns to topics as diverse as the legend of Mulan and the linguistic origin of the Chinese unicorn, the relations between kin and the treatment of canines in various Sino-Altaic cultures, the connections between the Huns, the Bulgars, and the Steppe peoples bordering China, Iranian cultural connections, the use of theophoric names in China and their cultural ancestry, and the likely ancestry (both tribal and cultural) of the celebrated Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi. [End Page 174] It is the historical and cultural context of the first essay, and a broader awareness of the norms of the Tuoba people, that filters through and grounds the entire collection. Chen's retelling of this 'open secret' of the Tang dynastic ancestry provides a solid and necessary frame for those who come to his collection without Chen's detailed and independent background in the broader history of the Middle Kingdom across a good two millennia. It is this breadth and depth of knowledge that infuses Chen's collection, both its core strength and its chief weakness. He has such a clear command of detail that at times he appears more to be clutching at evidence to support his initial claims, simply because they are so often repeated across each case study. Chen fails to build on the bigger picture of the first essay, but rather, goes smaller, dwells deeper, and in setting out his case he spends as much time debunking alternative interpretations as he does setting forth his own argument. While his ultimate contention - that Tang dynasty China contained a wealth of disparate and foreign influences across the royal dynasty, in administration, religion, language, and trade - is more than plausible, as Chen delves deep into each case there is the possibility he loses the reader who does not have quite the depth...

Hypertension and its correlates in two communities of dissimilar genetic ancestry in Sikkim, India

Background: Hypertension has emerged as a major health risk among adults and the elderly in India. In spite of sharing similar physical and cultural environments, group level cultural variability and distinct genetic ancestry may result in differences in patterns of hypertension prevalence.Aim: The present study investigates the relationships between socio-economic, lifestyle and anthropometric variables and hypertension in two communities (Rai and Bhutia) of Sikkim. Both groups live in a similar ecological setting and are exposed to forces of modernization of almost equal magnitude.Subjects and methods: The study sample consists of 582 Rais and 315 Bhutias. Information on socio-demographic characteristics, substance uses and other lifestyle variables were collected through relevant pre-tested questionnaires. Anthropometric measurements were taken following standard methods. Three consecutive blood pressure measurements were taken and averaged for analysis.Results: The results of covariance analyses show that ethnicity is not a significant covariate of either systolic or diastolic blood pressure. Use of tobacco and alcohol consumption, level of education and activity patterns were found to be significant correlates of hypertension. The diagnostic ability of waist circumference is found to be better than body mass index for assessment of risk of hypertension among the present study populations.Conclusions: Lifestyle factors more than ethnicity and socio-economic factors contribute to the development of hypertension in these populations. Based on the results of this study, we would suggest that a sustainable increase in physical activity and reduction in alcohol consumption would be helpful in the proper management of hypertension for both groups.