Early Western Research Articles

‘Philosophy and Tradition in Africa’: Critical Reflections on the Power and Vestiges of Colonial Nomenclature

The colonial narrative in Africa is replete with instances and processes of naming that were used not only to (re)construct social realities and (re)produce power and privilege, but also to inscribe, reify or denigrate African cultures. This work examines how the discourse of naming, specifically terms selected, stipulatively defined and applied by Western colonialists and early Western anthropologists, continue to sustain ambivalent attitudes towards the African heritage. It analyses the way in which the popular term and prefix ‘traditional’ is used in Africa, and argues that it can be pejorative, as it is associated with the well-established colonial custom of thinking of Africa as a continent stuck in the past. Thus the term predisposes scholars to making certain assumptions that perpetuate cultural stereotypes about African reality and experiences. The need for an analysis of the mentality that popularised its usage therefore remains pertinent. The work also attempts to address the challenge of how postcolonial Africa can engage with its past, and talk about it in terms that do not perpetuate colonial derogation, stereotypes, assumptions, attitudes and misrepresentations of indigenous African thought and culture. Key words. Tradition, modernity, post-colonial African philosophy, naming, colonial epithets Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK)New Series, Vol.3 No.1, June 2011, pp.1-19

An important military city of the Early Western Zhou Dynasty: Archaeobotanical evidence from the Chenzhuang site, Gaoqing, Shandong Province

In ancient Chinese history, the Western Zhou Dynasty has long been renowned for having expanded its control and territory into many other states. However, historical documents and archaeological records of this period are limited; thus the early history of the Western Zhou Dynasty’s operation in eastern China and its establishment of the Qi and Lu states have been unclear. The discovery of the Chenzhuang city site in Gaoqing County, Shandong Province, with chariot-horse pits, an altar and bronze vessels with inscriptions, adds a new line of evidence for studying the history of this period. However, with no direct evidence, the nature of the city site is controversial. Plant remains, especially a large number of sweet clover seeds, recovered from this site by systematic archaeobotanical methods provide an important source of information for research into the site’s function. Considering that modern sweet clover is superior fodder for horses and the sweet clover seeds from the Chenzhuang site coexist with chariot-horse pits and horse remains, it is suggested these sweet clover seeds might represent the fodder of battle steeds. This suggestion supports the opinion of those who believe the Chenzhuang city site was once an important military city of the Western Zhou Dynasty in eastern China.

Harput, Turkey to Massachusetts: Immigration of Jacobite Christians

This brief study of the immigration of the Jacobite Christians originally from Harput, Turkey who settled in New England, shows a variety of distinct method(s) of identity preservation and transmission to subsequent generations, especially in regard to personal and group identity structures. These people, sometimes referred to as “Jacobite Syrians” by early Western travellers and missionaries, identified themselves as the “sons of Asshur” in 1842. (Southgate 1856:87) This paper is a narrative of the community’s tribulations in their country of origin during the first half of the twentieth century, internal religious politics espoused by the church, as well as their life and establishment in American society.

Constituency Control of Legislators: Lessons from Nigeria

It has been argued that it is ‘rather curious’ to claim that societies without a modern system of government have no government: ‘It is a rather curious hypothesis to advance that because these societies lack modern government paraphernalia, they lack government of any kind.’ It would be rather absurd to say that the pre-colonial societies that constitute present-day Nigeria or any other African country did not have some form of constitutional arrangement or another, by whatever name it might have been known. It must be added that early Western education and military might were the only advantages that those societies lacked to advance their own cause, political ideals, ideologies and constitutional norms. In pre-colonial Nigeria there were the Sokoto Caliphate, Bornu Empire, Benin Empire, Oyo Empire, the Calabari and other societies. These territorial frameworks had their own systems of government, whether emirate or kingship, which were quite functional and satisfied the needs of their people, though there may have been a need for reforms. Some, if not all, of these empires, kingdoms and societies had their own constitutional arrangement, the executive, legislature, judiciary and system of control, whether political or constitutional. No matter by what name they were called and administered, the most important thing was that they had a system, which functioned well until the ‘protectors’, who wanted everything their own way, found otherwise. However, traditional African societies had their legislative process, which was identical in structure and form. Although the king, Oba or the chief was the traditional paramount ruler, he was usually assisted by the council of chiefs in decision-making. For example, it is recorded that the Oba of Benin met frequently with his council of chiefs to take decisions. These decisions were binding on all his subjects. According to Bradbury, while writing about the Kingdom of Benin:

Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (review)

Reviewed by: Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning Don Schweitzer Avihu Zakai . Jonathan Edwards’s Philosophy of Nature: The Re-Enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning. New York: T & T Clark International, 2010. Pp. ix + 331. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-0-567-22650-1. This enlightening study by Avihu Zakai locates Jonathan Edwards’s understanding of nature and his metaphysical world view within the historical context of intellectual movements occurring in North Atlantic societies from the second half of the 1600s to the end of the 1700s. Zakai illustrates how the rise of modern scientific thought in the work of people like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton produced a mechanistic understanding of nature that undermined many traditional Christian beliefs and helped dethrone theology as the queen of the sciences. He then examines resistance to the world view that their work and the thought of philosophers like Descartes helped create, with chapters on John Donne, Blaise Pascal, and reactions to Newton’s mechanistic view of nature. Edwards’s thought is then expounded in the final two chapters in relation to this new view of nature and the reaction against it. Zakai shows that this mechanistic world view was perceived by Donne, Pascal, Blake, Swift, and others to have a dehumanizing side, even though advocates and practitioners of the new experimental sciences sought to benefit humanity by increasing human sovereignty over nature through scientific knowledge (98). Nature, interpreted in light of the findings of the natural sciences, became a new source of knowledge, the Book of Nature that clashed with and was to be preferred to knowledge obtained from religious traditions and the Bible. In sum, the natural sciences produced a new view of knowledge (95–96) that helped de-legitimize Scripture and Christian traditions as sources of knowledge. Zakai then describes how the colonial New England Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) responded to this movement. Like the physico-theologians who attempted to prove God’s existence from the order and harmony of nature, Edwards sought to prove that nature demonstrated the existence and nature of God and manifested God’s wisdom (47). For Edwards, creation was finally intelligible only in light of God and God’s purposes. Against the mechanized views of the natural world, arrived at by natural scientists and deist notions of God accompanying them, Edwards formulated a sophisticated understanding of nature as ontologically dependent upon God and created for the purpose of expressing and communicating God’s attributes to humanity (257). Edwards employed classical and medieval notions like the great chain of being to this [End Page 145] effect, in many respects remaining pre-modern in some of his concepts. But Edwards’s relationship to Western modernity was always dialectical. While he opposed deism and what might be described as secularizing trends in Western thought, he greeted advances in the natural sciences and humanities as part of the advance of God’s providential work and modified notions like the great chain of being in light of findings of the natural sciences (263). In relation to the culture of the English Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, Edwards’s arguments represented “the expiring power of Calvinism” (229). But in the American colonies his thought helped created “a well-defined American Protestant culture” (229). Zakai situates Edwards in a very illuminating way within the intellectual struggle between traditional Reformed theology and the New Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Perry Miller famously stressed Edwards’s modernity and how far he was ahead of his time. Zakai shows that while Edwards was a creative thinker, he was also very much a person of his time, striving to retain Calvinist affirmations of God’s direct activity in history in the face of the disenchantment with the world in early Western modernity. He shows that what Miller championed as Edwards’s modernity resulted in part from Edwards’s resistance to the disenchantment of the world that Western modernity effected. As Edwards resisted this movement, he incorporated many insights of early modern philosophy and natural science into his theology, producing “a serious and systematic alternative to Enlightenment modes of...

Face‐Lifting Palestine: Early Western Accounts of the Palestinian Refugee Problem

The traditional historical narrative on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem argues that the large majority of Palestinian Arab refugees left their homeland voluntarily, acting upon the orders of their own political and military leaders. Historical research has been able to scrutinize these perceptions, and it can be demonstrated that the narrative of voluntary exile almost certainly originated in Israeli government circles during the early stages of the 1948 Israel–Palestine war. This paper analyses the publications of a large number of western witnesses of the 1948 war. While most of these writers stay well within the parameters of the traditional discourse, a few are more critical in their analyses of the causes of the Palestinian exodus. Many western eyewitnesses in Palestine understood human history as a redemptive process, and through this lens the “re‐establishment” of a Jewish state became a significant chapter in the natural and inevitable cumulative progress of western civilization. Within this frame of mind, the refugee problem was a relatively minor nuisance that should not hinder the admirable developments in Palestine spurred by the Zionist enterprise.

Building Competitive Advantage from Ubuntu: Management Lessons from South Africa

Much of management theory is based on the writings of early 20th-century Western scholars whose disciplinary orientations were heavily grounded in economics and classical sociology. These writings depict homo sapiens as an individualistic, utility-maximizing, transaction-oriented species. In contrast, recent scholarship has revealed the gender and racio-ethnic biases of these theories, and shown them to be invalid models of human nature. Humans are social and communal beings. Along with rationality, we are guided by emotions such as anxiety, hope, disappointment, fear, anger, excitement, pity, and remorse. By acknowledging the importance of emotions, world management discourse can evolve more holistic, inclusive, and emancipatory theories. South Africa offers a unique opportunity for understanding the African concept of ubuntu or humaneness. Ubuntu is rich with consideration for compassion and communality. This article discusses the characteristics of ubuntu, explores situations in which it manifests itself in the workplace, and argues that ubuntu can give competitive advantage to companies that incorporate its principles and practices.

Reading the Church: William Durandus and a New Approach to the History of Ecclesiology

AbstractIn the study of ecclesiology it is often said that the first treatises on the Church were written during the controversies around the bull Unam sanctam (1302) of Pope Boniface VIII. These works and their successors provide a political and institutional ecclesiology determined by the author's attitude to the papal claims. Before the bull, however, a friend of Boniface, William Durandus of Mende, wrote a commentary on the liturgy that summarised a very different ecclesiology which has its roots in the New Testament and the Fathers. The first book of his Rationale divinorum officiorum draws on previous tradition and uses the methods of spiritual exegesis of the Bible to provide a balanced ecclesiology from a 'reading' of the church-building. The wide circulation of the Rationale in late medieval and early modern Western Europe ensured that this traditional ecclesiology was quietly handed on, but modern writers have ignored it. A study of Durandus's interpretation of a church enables us to retrieve this tradition and suggests a new narrative for the history of ecclesiology.

Prices and the growth of the knowledge economy in Sweden and Western Europe before the industrial revolution

This article uses long-term series of real prices for various goods and services to analyse the evolution of the knowledge economy before the Industrial Revolution by focusing on Sweden in comparison with other European countries. During the early modern period, the relative price of knowledge-intensive goods and services, such as iron, paper, salt, sea transports and silver, decreased relative to a Consumer Price Index. The increased productivity levels of these goods and services were caused by increased division of labour and accelerated diffusion of knowledge. However, the real price of foodstuff tended to increase, implying that living standards declined with increased population. Early modern Western Europe acquired a peculiar price structure, characterized by low prices of industrial goods relative to the price of food. Only with the advent of industrial society could the knowledge economy escape the Malthusian entrapment.

The Quilon Limestone, Kerala Basin, India: an archive for Miocene Indo-Pacific seagrass beds

Reuter, M., Piller, W.E., Harzhauser, M., Kroh, A., Rögl, F. & Ćorić, S. 2010: The Quilon Limestone, Kerala Basin, India: an archive for Miocene Indo-Pacific seagrass beds. Lethaia, Vol. 44, pp. 76–86. The facies of the fossiliferous Quilon Limestone in SW India is described for the first time in detail at the Padappakkara-type locality. Facies (fossiliferous, micrite-rich, bioturbated sediment with intercalated sand pockets) and faunal composition (epiphytic foraminifers, seagrass feeding Smaragdia gastropods, bioimmuration of celleporiform bryozoan colonies) indicate a seagrass environment. The large discoidal archaiasin foraminifer Pseudotaberina malabarica, in particular, is considered as a proxy for seagrass communities. Recent seagrasses have their centre of generic richness in the Indo-Pacific where they cover wide areas in the tidal and shallow sub-tidal zones. However, their geological record is only fragmentary and their palaeobiogeographic distribution has a big stratigraphical gap in the Miocene Western Indo-Pacific region. The described nannoplankton flora and planktonic foraminifers from the Quilon Formation demonstrate that the deposition of the studied seagrass bed occurred in nannoplankton biozone NN3. This timing suggests formation during the closure of the Tethyan Seaway. The Quilon Limestone is thus an early Western Indo-Pacific seagrass bed and an important step in reconstructing the history of seagrass communities. □Quilon Formation, Pseudotaberina malabarica, seagrass facies, Burdigalian, Indo-Pacific.

Small Town, Big Campaigns. The Rise and Growth of an International Advertising Industry in Amsterdam

Röling R. W. Small town, big campaigns. The rise and growth of an international advertising industry in Amsterdam, Regional Studies. This paper presents an historical analysis of international advertising by describing four waves of advertising from early twentieth-century Western capitalism. This analysis is necessary to understand the dynamics within the organizational structure of the global advertising industry, with a tendency both of concentration in global network advertising agencies and of de-concentration, as small, flexible, and independent international advertising agencies came to the fore as innovative players. It is particularly this emerging group of smaller independent agencies that use Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a hub to create advertisements for the international market, and thereby have contributed to the increasing international importance of Amsterdam's advertising industry from the early 1990s and onwards. The difference between the different types of advertising agencies in terms of their market position is best reflected by their project networks. The global network advertising agencies turn out to be highly locally orientated, whereas the independents turn out to be much more international. Röling R. W. Une petite ville, d'importantes campagnes. L'essor et le déclin de la publicité internationale à Amsterdam, Regional Studies. Cet article cherche à présenter une analyse historique de la publicité internationale en décrivant quatre vagues de publicité à partir du capitalisme occidental du début du vingtième siècle. Cette analyse facilite une meilleure compréhension de la dynamique au sein de la structure organisationnelle de la publicité mondiale qui a une tendance à la concentration des agences de publicité en réseau mondial et à la déconcentration, au fur et à mesure que les agences internationales flexibles indépendantes de petite taille se font connaître comme acteurs innovateurs. C'est notamment ce groupe naissant d'agences indépendantes plus petites qui se sert d'Amsterdam en Hollande comme noyau afin de créer des publicités pour le marché international et, par la suite, a contribué à l'importance internationale croissante de la publicité à Amsterdam à partir des années 1990. La différence des agences de publicité en termes de leur situation sur le marché se reflète le mieux dans leur réseaux de projet. Il s'avère que les agences de publicité en réseau mondial visent fortement le marché local, tandis que les indépendants visent plutôt le marché international. Publicité Industries de la culture Mondialisation Réseaux de projet Röling R. W. Kleine Stadt, große Kampagnen: Aufstieg und Wachstum einer internationalen Werbebranche in Amsterdam, Regional Studies. Dieser Beitrag enthält eine historische Analyse der internationalen Werbung. Beschrieben werden vier Werbewellen aus dem westlichen Kapitalismus des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Diese Analyse ist erforderlich für ein Verständnis der Dynamik innerhalb der Organisationsstruktur der weltweiten Werbebranche, bei der einerseits eine Tendenz zu einer Konzentration in weltweiten Netzwerk-Werbeagenturen und andererseits eine Tendenz zur Dekonzentration durch den Aufstieg innovativer Akteure in Form von kleinen, flexiblen und unabhängigen internationalen Werbeagenturen zu verzeichnen ist. Insbesondere diese neue Gruppe von kleinen und unabhängigen Agenturen hat Amsterdam in den Niederlanden als Drehkreuz für die Entwicklung von Anzeigen für den internationalen Markt genutzt und damit zur gewachsenen internationalen Bedeutung der Werbebranche von Amsterdam seit Beginn der neunziger Jahre beigetragen. Der Unterschied zwischen den verschiedenen Arten von Werbeagenturen hinsichtlich ihrer Marktposition zeigt sich am besten an ihren Projekt-Netzwerken. Die globalen Netzwerk-Werbeagenturen erweisen sich als hochgradig lokal orientiert, während sich die unabhängigen Agenturen als deutlich internationaler erweisen. Werbung Kulturbranchen Globalisierung Projekt-Netzwerke Röling R. W. Ciudad pequeña, grandes campañas: el ascenso y el crecimiento de una industria publicitaria internacional en Ámsterdam, Regional Studies. En este artículo presentamos un análisis histórico de la publicidad internacional al describir cuatro olas de publicidad en el capitalismo occidental a principios del siglo XX. Este análisis es necesario para entender las dinámicas dentro de la estructura organizativa de la industria publicitaria global, con una tendencia a la concentración en las agencias de publicidad de redes globales y la desconcentración cuando las pequeñas agencias de publicidad internacionales, flexibles e independientes se establecieron como protagonistas innovadores. Es especialmente este grupo emergente de pequeñas agencias independientes que usan Ámsterdam en los Países Bajos como un eje para crear anuncios para el mercado internacional, por lo que han contribuido a la creciente importancia internacional de la industria publicitaria de Ámsterdam desde principios de los noventa. La diferencia entre los diferentes tipos de agencias de publicidad en cuanto a su posición en el mercado se refleja mejor en sus redes de proyectos. La red global de agencias de publicidad resulta ser altamente orientada a nivel local mientras que las agencias independientes son mucho más internacionales. Publicidad Industrias culturales Globalización Redes de proyectos

Badmen, bandits, and folk heroes: the ambivalence of Mexican American identity in literature and film

Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes is a comparative study of the literary and cinematic representation of Mexican American masculine identity from early twentieth-century adventure stories and movie Westerns through contemporary self-representations by Chicano/a writers and filmmakers. In this deeply compelling book, Juan J. Alonzo proposes a reconsideration of the early stereotypical depictions of Mexicans in fiction and film: rather than viewing stereotypes as unrelentingly negative, Alonzo presents them as part of a complex apparatus of identification and disavowal. Furthermore, Alonzo reassesses Chicano/a self-representation in literature and film, and argues that the Chicano/a expression of identity is characterized less by essentialism than by an acknowldgement of the contingent status of present-day identity formations. Alonzo opens his provocative study with a fresh look at the adventure stories of Stephen Crane and the silent Western movies of D. W. Griffith. He also investigates the conflation of the greaser, the bandit, and the Mexican revolutionary into one villainous figure in early Western movies and, more broadly, traces the development of the badman in Westerns. He newly interrogates the writings of Americo Paredes regarding the makeup of Mexican masculinity, and productively trains his analytic eye on the recent films of Jim Mendiola and the contemporary poetry of Evangelina Vigil. Throughout Badmen, Bandits, and Folk Heroes, Alonzo convincingly demonstrates how fiction and films that formerly appeared one-dimensional in their treatment of Mexicans and Mexican Americans actually offer surprisingly multifarious and ambivalent representations. At the same time, his valuation of indeterminacy, contingency, and hybridity in contemporary cultural production creates new possibilities for understanding identity formation.

From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Reimagining the "Dusky Maiden" through the Visual Arts

For centuries the image of the Dusky Maiden has occupied a prominent place in the Western imagination. Indeed, nowhere has it been so effectively shaped and deployed than through the visual arts. Portrayed as naive belles-cum-femme fatales through early Western paintings and later photographs, Polynesian women were presented to foreign audiences as symbols of the exotic, erotic, and dangerous. In the contemporary period, female Polynesian artists have sought to reconceptualize, challenge, subvert, and invert the image of their dusky maiden "sibling" in order to open up alternative spaces in which to reread this centuries-old icon. Here, I focus on the visual art creations of three women: Rosanna Raymond, Shigeyuki Kihara, and Sue Pearson, each of whom is actively engaged in reinscribing the stereotype of the Dusky Maiden with new and empowering meaning.

Understanding Emasculation: Western Medical Perspectives on Chinese Eunuchs

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, western physicians and medical observers became fascinated by the Chinese practice of emasculating young boys and men to serve as palace eunuchs. As a result of interaction and encounters between western physicians and Chinese eunuch patients at western hospitals and dispensaries in Peking, emasculation became a serious subject of medical inquiry that also shed light on Chinese-western mutual perceptions. The writings of these western physicians are the only known historical accounts of the emasculation procedure from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) extant today. More than just voyeuristic commentaries on another Orientalist stereotype of 'exotic' China, these accounts presented readers with what their authors perceived to be textual evidence of the efficacy and/or superiority of western medicine and even offered insight and medical data of importance for topics being debated in the West, such as the use of castration to resolve sexual and psychological deviancy.

Severity of alcoholism in Indian males: Correlation with age of onset and family history of alcoholism

Background:Family History of Alcoholism and earlier Age of Onset are found to predict Severity of alcoholism. Previous Indian studies in this regard have methodological issues related to the definition of alcoholism and reliability of information obtained.Aims:To study the relationship between the Age of onset/Family History and Severity of alcoholism.Settings and Design:Consecutively admitted, 20 to 50 year old men, with alcohol-related problems at an urban teaching hospital, were recruited.Materials and Methods:After detoxification, alcohol use detection inventory test, severity of alcohol dependence questionnaire, schedule for clinical assessment in neuropsychiatry, and family interview for genetic studies were administered. Family history density was computed.Statistics:Pearson’s correlations, linear regression, and ANOVA tests were used.Results:Family history density and severity of alcoholism were positively correlated. Age of onset of initiation had a significant negative correlation with severity. The effect of family history on the rapidity of development of Problem-drinking did not reach statistical significance among those with early age of onset. The variance explained by the ‘family history status’ and ‘age of onset’ for the severity of alcoholism was similar to that reported in earlier western studies.Conclusion:This study, with enhanced methodology, using a general hospital sample of problem drinkers concludes that the age of onset of initiation is a better predictor of severity of alcoholism, than family history of alcoholism alone. Postponing the use of alcohol till the age of 25 years could be explored as a primary prevention strategy in genetically vulnerable adolescents.

The Loss of the Holy Land and Sir Isumbras: Literary Contributions to Fourteenth-Century Crusade Discourse

In the late thirteenth century, western Europe suffered the notable disgrace of losing the last of the Christian strongholds in mainland Syria with the fall of Acre in 1291, and yet throughout the early fourteenth century Western powers were unable to launch a crusade to recover the Holy Land despite repeated and costly attempts. Until not long ago, historians of the crusades had interpreted the inaction of the fourteenth century as a sign that the age of true crusading was over and that both disillusionment with the machinery of the papal indulgence and increasing local strife effectively removed the possibility of international cooperative action that a crusade to the Holy Land required. Recent scholarly work on the late Middle Ages has shown that this interpretation ignores both historical reality and late-medieval attitudes toward crusading. Acre's loss in many respects crystallized issues regarding crusade reform, and, though no new crusade to the Holy Land ever materialized, crusading in its various...

Vantagens de imigrantes e desvantagens de negros: emprego, propriedade, estrutura familiar e alfabetização depois da abolição no oeste paulista

Based on data from a municipal census in 1907, this study compared the situations of Blacks, White Brazilians, and various immigrant groups in early 20th century Western Sao Paulo. Contrary to assertions in the literature, many Black families were small coffee farmers, and Blacks competed with Europeans in various other manual occupations. Meanwhile, Blacks were almost completely absent from the elites, and literacy rates were extremely low among Blacks, including in the new generation, born after Abolition. The study analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of these various groups, thereby contributing to new hypotheses on the consequences of large-scale European immigration for the Black population.

Abstract A188: Proapoptotic versus prosurvival function of the MAP kinase p38 induced by HDAC inhibitor in hematological malignant cells

Abstract Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) have recently emerged as promising anticancer agents. However, the mechanisms by which HDAC inhibitors arrest proliferation and induce apoptosis in tumor cells is far from clear. Activation of the stress MAP kinases and induction of DNA damage by different HDACi have been reported, however, the potential role of the MAP kinase p38 in the antitumor activity of these drugs has not been described. P38 is known to be activated independently or downstream of DNA damage. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the mechanisms by which the HDACi vorinostat (Zolinza®) triggers apoptosis in haematological malignant cells. We show that DNA damage as well as activation of p38 occurs relatively early in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) cell lines after treatment with vorinostat. Using comet assays, we detected direct evidence of early DNA damage and western blotting revealed induction of the DNA damage response proteins ATM and Chk2. We performed cell cycle analysis, and observed within the vorinostat-treated AML cell population, cells exiting G1 and accumulating in the G2-M phase of the cell cycle, where they subsequently underwent apoptosis. Notably, downregulation of p38 by shRNA or inhibition of p38 and β activity by the inhibitor SB203580 significantly decreased both G2-M accumulation and apoptosis induced by vorinostat, indicating a pro-apoptotic p38 function. Interestingly, several other HDACi tested all induced p38 activation but, depending on the HDACi, this activation was found to be either pro or antiapoptotic. The short-chain fatty acid sodium butyrate (NaB) requires p38 for induction of apoptosis, like vorinostat. On the other hand, LBH589, from the structural class encompassing vorinostat, does not depend on p38 for induction of apoptosis. Furthermore, p38 serves as a pro-survival signal when induced by the benzimide MGCD0103. In conclusion, we have shown that vorinostat-induced apoptosis in AML cells is preceded by generation of DNA damage and accumulation of cells in the G2-M phase of the cell cycle. Further, G2-M arrest and apoptosis induction (but not DNA damage) by vorinostat requires activation of the p38 MAP kinase, which is not the case for all HDACi. Therefore, a better understanding of the role of p38 MAPK in the action of specific HDACi may help in the development of rational combination regimes including these targeted agents. Citation Information: Mol Cancer Ther 2009;8(12 Suppl):A188.

Responsibility, ‘Bad Luck’, and Delinquent Animals: Law as a Means of Explaining Tragedy

This article examines the phenomenon of the prosecution and punishment of animals in medieval and early modern Western legal systems. Animal trials are important because examining them can help us learn more about the functions of legal proceedings. The article considers potential explanations regarding these trials. With reference to Nicholas Humphrey's idea that the animal trials were the product of a search for order, the article subsequently argues that the notion that law can make sense of tragedies by defining them as the consequence of culpable conduct is illuminating in the context of contemporary English law. By conducting an analysis of a well-known contemporary criminal law case, the James Bulger trial, the article shows that one can plausibly interpret the outcome of certain significant modern cases as having the function of explaining tragedies in a relatively reassuring manner, and that this function may conflict with the requirement of ‘doing justice’.

SHOT at Fifty

Technology and Culture enters its fiftieth year of publication with the strongest revenue base in its history, a growing number of new submissions, and a publication rate of approximately 30 percent, reflecting the quality of its referees. The journal's database can search for referees or book reviewers by expertise in subject matter, geographical area, and time period. As of this writing, the database references 4,738 people, more than 1,500 of whom being what an editor would call go-to people. They represent SHOT/T&Cs primary asset, a pool of expertise that has begun to expand out beyond SHOT/ T&C's early Western civilization bias to a world of research questions that more accurately reflects technological practices as global and multicultural. As the session organizers requested, our three speakers this evening approach this half-century mark variously. Tom Hughes concentrates on SHOTs earliest years. Wiebe Bijker and Rebecca Herzig, on the other hand, attend to SHOT in the present. SHOT's healthy state, they both argue, renders new moral challenges inescapable. I will comment on each talk and then add some observations of my own about how SHOT/ T&C reached its current level of organizational maturity.