Intimate Familiarity Research Articles

Taxonomic Chaos in the Confused Canadian Bioethics Industry: Apres Moi la Deluge

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of a decade-old movement in Canada to purportedly raise ethical standards in research with human subjects, even though no systematic evidence has ever been presented either that there are serious ethical problems (especially in psychological research), or that the solutions imposed by the movement would improve the ethical situation, and not harm research's fundamental epistemological enterprise. The movement began with the activities of a committee from Canada's three major government research councils, the Tri-Council Committee (TCC). Like all ideological enterprises, it provided taxonomic chaos by, for example, confusing ethics with epistemology and feelings of discomfort concerning an area of investigation with intellectual expertise about that area. It also went beyond its American counterparts by calling its proposals a code of conduct rather than guidelines, and proposing that if a so-called research participant (i.e., a subject) did not like the investigator's hypotheses, she or he could withdraw “her” or “his” data. Even after the TCC and its various bureaucratic progeny retreated (though ambiguously) from these absurd positions, there has been a maintenance of such positions as the right and responsibility of IRBs to advise not only on the ethical issue of the treatment of subjects, but also on epistemological issues of research design. These issues require not only expertise in the requisite disciplines, but also an intimate familiarity with highly specialized sub-areas. In practical terms senior researchers may be able deal with the burgeoning North American bioethics industry and ignore the anti-epistemological and implicit principles according to which the industry operates. Younger researchers, who have no memory of how research used to be conducted, will succumb, and, in an epistemological sense, be “corrupted”. As the last phrase of my title suggests, senior researchers are currently acting like France's Louis XV.

Caribbean Literature and the Environment (review)

Reviewed by: Caribbean Literature and the Environment Martin Munro Caribbean Literature and the Environment Ed. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, René K. Gosson, and George B. Handley Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. xii + 303 pp. ISBN 0-8139-2373-5 cloth. It is always a risky endeavor to apply a set of theories conceived in developed nations to other, less-developed regions. From Marxism to surrealism, and perhaps the generalizing strands of postcolonialism, there is a long history of cultural and ideological mismatches between "first" and "third" worlds. Fortunately, the editors of this volume are well aware of the risk of intellectual imperialism in applying their particular critical perspective—ecocriticism—to the Caribbean without paying due attention to the contradictions and pitfalls of such a project. The lengthy introduction stresses the editors' sensitivity to accusations of "grafting" (27) ecocriticism onto the Caribbean, and also contains a useful critique of the introverted focus of North American ecological criticism. Indeed, such is their concern with stressing their sensitivity that they tend to overstate the importance of "neoimperialism" in perpetuating Caribbean environmental degradation, while giving a pass to the region's independent governments, which (as the editors do realize) have failed to prioritize the environment, and in many cases mistreat the land as if this were their historical right, passed down from Conquistador and colonialist. The introduction points to the risk that unless it is applied with some conviction and courage, as well as sensitivity, this potentially useful critical perspective might wither under the weight of its own good intentions. Thankfully, the volume's essays and interviews do not lack for critical incisiveness and analytical precision. Antonio Benítez-Rojo sets the standard for the rest of the book with his concise, poetic, personal, and collective sweep through thousands of years of Cuban ecological and political history. His intimate familiarity with the various post-Columbian economic "machines" leads him to say that a "clean, green" development is a future possibility for Cuba, but, he asks with some skepticism, "Is it probable?" (50). Derek Walcott's "Isla Incognita" is written in similarly beautiful, poetic prose, though it deals less with ecology than with internal, or internalized geography, the relationship between landscapes, seasons, climate, and creativity. Another accomplished poet, Cyril Dabydeen, offers an evocative piece, which details how he and his ancestors gradually embedded themselves in the coastal landscape of Guyana, a place where "King Sugar was lord and master" (61) and where the experience of place is shaped irrevocably by the plantation. Dabydeen's essay is complemented by Shona Jackson's lucid and compelling chapter on the El Dorado myth, and its re-incorporation into Guyanese nationalist discourse. Taking Wilson Bigaud's Paradis Terrestre as her poto mitan, and subtly adopting the spinning movements of the trickster spider Anansi into her prose, LeGrace Benson weaves her way around the history of Haitian paradise landscape painting with such skill that one hardly notices the visual absence of the paintings she describes. Jana Evans Braziel's essay takes up directly the editors' challenge to rethink ecocriticism in a Caribbean context, and her engaging analyses of Glissant, Kincaid, and Walcott show effectively the potential of these authors to "move ecocriticism beyond nature writing" (124). While all of the essays are of a [End Page 217] high standard, of particular further note are Isabel Hoving's eco-feminist reading of Shanti Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, Natasha Tinsley's original and engaging essay on how colonial discourses of nature in Suriname shaped conceptions of what is sexually "natural" and acceptable, Helen Tiffin's masterful account of how English representations of the tropics have influenced anglophone Caribbean writers, and Heidi Bojsen's equally impressive reading of "rhizomatic narration" in Patrick Chamoiseau's Biblique des derniers gestes. Analytic precision is not therefore compromised by the volume's breadth of focus; appropriately enough, there is a finally a feeling of organic wholeness, of each part being in dialogue with all the others, and of critical, disciplinary, and linguistic boundaries dissolving in a most promising way. Martin Munro University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

Merton's Hermitage: Bachelard, Domestic Space, and Spiritual Transformation

Merton's Hermitage:Bachelard, Domestic Space, and Spiritual Transformation Belden C. Lane (bio) "Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imagination." —Mary Oliver1 The stereotype of the hermit is more or less fixed in the popular mind. Hermits are crazy old fools, secluded in their lonely huts, communing with nature, and caring little what other people think of them. Ryokan, the eighteenth-century Zen Master, was a classic example. He spent thirty years of his life in a hermitage delightfully surrounded by "a thousand peaks, ten thousand mountain paths, yet no sign of human beings."2 He called himself "the Great Fool" and on those rare occasions when he was seen at all, people usually found him playing games in the dirt with children. At the age of 68 he fell in love with a young Buddhist nun who was less than half his age.3 The parallels to Thomas Merton are curious, but incomplete. He, too, delighted in the quiet setting of his hermitage. "I belong in these woods," he said, living in intimate familiarity with the fifteen pairs of birds he observed nesting nearby.4 He also took joy in the alleged eccentricities of the solitary life. In a letter to Bob Lax, he laughed, "Well now I got to take Rex for a run round the clock, and fire off the steam engines, and lay open the thermostats to dry out in the weather, and fly a kite and put out the cat and bathe the canary and punish the children and sell the estate and wheel Uncle Ray back into his closet."5 And yes, he fell in love with a young nurse half his age. But it was not the case that Thomas Merton couldn't care less what other people thought of him. He struggled much of his life with a need for the approval of others. In fact, it was not until he yielded fully to the discipline of the hermitage that he was able finally to realize the deconstruction (and reconstruction) of self that were necessary for his personal wholeness. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard spoke of the hermit's hut as symbolizing "the tap-root of the function of inhabiting." The image of the lamp-lit hermitage in the distance, with its solitary figure keeping vigil, reduces our [End Page 123] confused notions of dwelling to a basic simplicity. The power of the archetype of the hermitage, he says, derives "from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb 'to inhabit.'" This is not a romanticized image of a picturesque hut deep in the forest. Rather, it strips the human experience of domestic living to a centralized solitude where joy is discovered in relinquishing everything except what is most important. Finding that "felicity of intense poverty," according to Bachelard, comes from occupying one's house most simply and imaginatively.6 As Abba Moses reminded the other desert fathers in the fourth century, "Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything."7 Heidegger argued that language is the house of being and it is just as true that our house speaks a language evoking and constituting our existence. Figuratively entering the hermit's abode, then, means giving up all that is unnecessary, abandoning external constructions of meaning, and reducing life to its bare essentials. As Bachelard put it, "The hermit is alone before God. His hut, therefore, is just the opposite of the monastery."8 In the hermitage he embraces the loss of companionship, setting aside the protective masks he might have worn in the past and coming face to face with God. The insights of Gaston Bachelard are particularly helpful in analyzing the role that the hermitage played as a symbolic space in Thomas Merton's experience. My focus in this essay will be on the important events of Merton's interior and exterior life through the tumultuous year of 1965-1966, his first year of living full time in the hermitage north of...

The Jewish Obligation to Stand Up against Islamophobia in the United States

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out –because I was not a communist;Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –because I was not a socialist;Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out –because I was not a trade unionist;Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out –because I was not a Jew;Then they came for me –and there was no one left to speak out for me.The German anti-Nazi Protestant minister, Martin Niemoeller, spoke thesepoignant words following the end of World War II. Pastor Niemoellerreminds us that whenever society singles out a specific minority for abuse,the rest of society must resist. What folly it is to believe that during a timeof insecurity and suspicion, any minority – religious, ethnic, or political –can long enjoy immunity from oppression. The Jewish people, perhapsmore than other minorities, has an intimate familiarity with the plight ofthe scapegoat, a 2,000 year history of diaspora and minority status, withall the cruelty and violence that has accompanied this experience. In thiswork, we will cite Biblical sources, cultural traditions, and rabbinic teachings to express the inescapable obligation of Jews to stand in solidaritywith Muslims in their time of need.Make no mistake about it: Muslims now confront unprecedented discriminationand harassment in the United States. In a recent report, theAmerican-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) reports a significantincrease in the frequency of hate crimes and acts of discriminationperpetrated against Arabs (both Muslims and Christians) and non-ArabMuslims.1 The list includes hundreds of acts of physical violence, some 60incidents of Arab or Muslim passengers being prevented from traveling onairlines simply because of their “profile,” several hundred employmentdiscrimination cases, and serious concerns arising from the USA PatriotAct. Tabloid media and bigoted radio talk show hosts contribute to anatmosphere of Islamophobia, and some Americans associate the word“Muslim” or “Arab” with “terrorist.” Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, conservativepundit Ann Coulter, commenting on Arab and Muslim countries,suggested that “we should invade their countries, kill their leaders andconvert them to Christianity.”2 An Islamophobic atmosphere has takenhold in the United States, targeting Muslims not for any crime, but merelyfor being Muslims ...

Editorial: the American Century in Europe

In 1999, the Whitney Museum of American Art had a very successful exhibition called The American Century. Indeed, there were two exhibitions, The American Century, Part I about the first half of the 20th century and Part II dealing with the following 50 years. The presentation was divided up into decades, each of them having its own motto. The one for the 1950s was: ‘America takes command’. This may sound rather martial but the motto is indeed very appropriate, as one could argue that as from then on American leadership also included cultural leadership.The name of the exhibition, ‘The American Century’, was of course derived from the title of the famous article that Henry Luce, the editor/publisher of journals such as Life and Time, published in Life on 17 February 1941. Luce wanted the Americans to play a major role in the war for freedom and democracy that was in progress at that time and the building of the better world that would have to come after that. In his article Luce insisted that ‘our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals’. The idea of America as a world power and, indeed, as the world power of the future, is, of course, much older than the concept of the 20th century as the American century. Already in 1902, the British liberal journalist and advocate of world peace through arbitration, W.T. Stead published a book with the title The Americanization of the World, or the Trend of the Twentieth Century. According to Stead, the heyday of the British Empire was over and the US was the Empire of the future. The enormous success of America was due to three things: education, production and democracy. Britain's choice was between subjugation or cooperation. Stead even proposed the merger of the two countries. In the following decade, this idea that America was Britain's successor and that the two countries should – and could – form a union because of their intimate familiarity, became popular among British writers.

Moving through and Passing on: Fulani Mobility, Survival, and Identity in Ghana

Yaa P. A. Oppong. Moving Through and Passing On: Fulani Mobility, Survival, and Identity in Ghana. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002. xiv + 259 pp. Maps. Tables. Figures. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Price not reported. Cloth. Yaa Oppong conies to this study with an uncommon set of talents and a background that permits her to ferret out information and insights that often remain hidden in ethnographic investigations. She has command of Twi and Ga, two principal languages in southern Ghana, and she studied Fulfulde in France in preparation for her eighteen months of fieldwork among Fulani immigrants. The bibliography of the monograph reveals Oppong's intimate familiarity with both published literature and with unpublished materials in the library of the University of Ghana at Legon. Oppong seems to have been predestined to her study. Her father served thirty years earlier as a veterinarian on the Accra Plains, and he subsequently wrote a Ph.D. thesis on skin diseases of cattle in the region. Her mother, an academic, eagerly supported her daughter's work: On one occasion while Oppong was in the field she gave her cows as a birthday gift, an act that could only endear the ethnographer to her subjects, who prize cattle so highly! The cows remain in Ghana, but Oppong moved on to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and then to Harvard. Moving Through and Passing On focuses on the nature and perpetuation of Fulani ethnicity in the Greater Accra Region, an administrative area stretching about 120 km chiefly eastward from Accra and reaching inland approximately 40 km from the coast. The Fulani, resident in this area less than one hundred years, have retained their traditional interest in cattle, but increasingly they are being swept into the vortex of urban Accra and crowded by the expansion of that city. The initial two chapters of the book recount movements of Fulani in West Africa through space and time. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 constitute the core of the study. The final three chapters analyze elements instrumental in perpetuating-and dismembering-Fulani identity in this setting: secular education versus traditional Koranic instruction, deliberate displays in public parades, development of associations to foster Fulaniness, and the like. The study is based on ethnographic data developed through the life stories of 99 females and 105 males, with the informants divided roughly equally between urban, peri-urban, and rural settings. …

Expert judgment and occupational hygiene: application to aerosol speciation in the nickel primary production industry.

In many situations characterized by sparse data, occupational hygienists have used subjective judgments that are claimed to be derived from their experience and knowledge. While this practice is widespread, there has been no systematic study of 'expert judgment' or the 'art' of occupational hygiene. Indeed, there is a need to address the question of whether there is such a thing as 'expert opinion' in occupational hygiene that is broadly shared by practicing professionals. This research, employing 11 experts who estimate an exposure parameter (the percentages of four nickel species) in 12 workplaces in a nickel primary production industry, provides a large dataset from which useful inferences can be drawn about the quality of expert judgments and the variability among the experts. A well-designed questionnaire that provided succinct information about the processes and baseline data served to calibrate the experts. The Bayesian framework has been used in this work to develop posterior means and standard deviations of the percentages of the four nickel species in the 12 workplaces of interest in the company. These estimates of the nickel speciation are at least as precise as--and most of the time more precise than--those provided by the sparse measurement data. There was a very high degree of agreement among the experts. A majority of the experts agreed among themselves 92% of the time, while almost two-thirds agreed 73% of the time. This, coupled with the fact that the experts came from varied backgrounds, seems to suggest that there is indeed some broad body of specialized knowledge that the experts are drawing on to reach similar judgments. It also seems that one type of expert is not necessarily any better than any other kind, and expertise does not necessarily require intimate familiarity with the workplace. In this example, the expert judgment exercise has indeed enhanced the quality of our knowledge of the exposure 'fingerprints' for the nickel industry workplaces studied and the combination of expert judgment and sparse data is better than the sparse data alone. For occupational hygiene exposure assessment, our experience suggests that such expert judgment methods can provide a cost-effective means to improve and refine information about workplace hazards. However, more study is warranted for situations where the domain of the quantity of interest has a much wider range of values, e.g. actual exposure values.

The Impasse in the Igad Peace Process for Sudan: The Limits of Regional Peacemaking?

This article examines the progress (or rather, lack of it) of the initiative launched in 1993 by the Intergovernmental Authority for Drought and Development (IGADD) to achieve peace in Sudan. The initiative is seen as a model for regional co?operation in Africa and has received a high level of international support. However, it has yet to achieve success in spite of running as a high?profile mediation effort for more than seven years. The article offers a brief summary of the history of the process and tries to examine the obstacles and problems that have delayed its success. It also looks at some of the implications for regional peace?making in Africa, and concludes by offering some recommendations for breaking the deadlock. This is the only up?to?date and comprehensive account of the process known to the author, and is based on intimate familiarity with it. The analysis aims to place the peace process in the regional context, in contrast to other treatments which concentrate on internal Sudanese politics.

Innovative leads for antineoplastic drugs suggested by a more intimate familiarity with structural motifs of oncoproteins

Innovative leads for antineoplastic drugs suggested by a more intimate familiarity with structural motifs of oncoproteins

A Suburb of Europe: Nineteenth-Century Polish Approaches to Western Civilization by Jerzy s> Jedlicki (review)

350 SEER, 79, 2, 2001 inclusions in the glossary(e.g. Young Turks)but exclusions of some Russian terms which appear in the text (e.g. Preobrazhenskaia kantseliariia); missing accents in some of the list of placenames (e.g. Hango, Lw6w). It is also a pity that the 'Guide to FurtherReading' seems to end in i997 in a book published in 2000, notjust because it means the exclusion of my own SocialHistogy ofthe RussianEmpireI650-I825 (and also published by Longman) but also, more importantly,that of Russiain theAgeofPeter theGreat by LindseyHughes. The structureof the book and the divisionsin the chronologies also leads, at least to my mind, to some anomalies:the glossaryis poorlyplaced three-quartersof the way through the book; the division into geographical zones of foreign policy workswell forwarswith one countrybut poorly forthe GreatNorthern War and the Napoleonic Wars;matching legislation is awkwardlydivided by theme, so that, for example, the Charters to the Nobles and to the Towns which were issued on the same day in I785 are describedquite separatelyon pages 15- I6 and io0; the Decembrist movement is listed under 'Revolutionary and Labour Movements' but does not appear alongside other militaryr protestsunder 'The Armed Forces';the balance of materialrelatingto foreign policy and warisweighted very heavilytowardsthe twentiethcentury. Some of these points are, of course, simplya matterof preference.They do not detract from a book which is generally sound, immensely detailed and certainlybetterthan anythingelse availableon the market(and,in particular, it is a great improvement on J. Paxton's Companion to RussianHistoy (New York, I983). I would therefore dispute the author's modest assumption that the 'typicalreaderwill be non-Russian speaking'(p. viii);studentsof Russian language, cultureand historyand theirteacherswillfindmuch hereof interest and of value. Department ofInternational History JANET HARTLEY London School ofEconomics andPolitical Science Jedlicki,Jerzy. A Suburb ofEurope. Nineteenth-Centur) PolishApproaches to Jl7estern Civilization.Central European University Press, Budapest, I999). xxvii + 307 pp. Notes. Maps. Bibliography.Index. f31.OO; f 2.50. SCRUTINIZING and evaluating I00 yearsof Polishpolitical,socialandeconomic thought and its impact on the historyof the nationicannot be anythingbut a real challenge. It requiresfrom the writer not only a thorough knowledge of all the issues involved, but also an intimate familiarity with the intricate linkages between the original native utterances and the clearly discernible and significant foreign influences. To succeed in his task the writer must carefully select what he judges to count as important and dismiss what he considers as trivial and inconsequential and be able to reach the heart of the matter. He must ensure that the arguments and the controversies which have raged for years and often decades have lost nothing of their original force and the power to attract; and, with the help of carefully selected extracts from the key texts, he must be able to point out the immediate as well as the long-term consequences of the stand taken by the relevant thinkers anld thus retain the reader's interest until the very last page of his work. This very substantial book REVIEWS 351 byJerzy Jedlicki, Professorof History at the Instituteof History of the Polish Academy of Sciences, originally published in Polish in I988 and now in an abridged version in English, can be said to come close to meeting most of these criteria. The book consists of two parts. Part i, entitled 'Images of the Future', covers the period from the I780s to I863. Part 2, entitled 'Ambiguitiesof Progress', deals with a shorter span of time, from I864 to the 88os. What constitutesthe greatdivide is theJanuary Rising of I863 which so profoundly affectedthe outlookof the two opposingsides:the Polishyoungerthinkersand propagators of the new ideas and the defenders of the traditional national values;that is, the progressives,open to Westernideas and modernization,on the one hand, and, on the otherhand, the Sarmatians. The standing debate, indeed, the continuous confrontation between the guardians of native values and the advocates of new ideas of foreign origin has, naturally,been a constant featureof intellectuallife in all countries.The English-speakingreaderwillfindin ProfessorJedlicki'sbookwell-documented evidence that the Poles, even when theirfatherlandwas wiped off the map of Europe as a separate political entity and, partitioned, constituted only peripheral parts of three very differentempires, were not exempt from...

Where the Liberals Lost It: A Case Study

Where the Liberals Lost It: A Case Study Otis L. Graham Jr. (bio) Judith Stein. Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998. xiii + 410 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). History had a human face for Judith Stein. She travelled to Birmingham, Alabama to conduct research on a crippled steel industry (she doesn’t tell us when; sometime in the 1990s, evidently). The Birmingham USX facility had employed 27,000 workers during World War II to, and had shriveled to 2,400 when she arrived. Her cab driver was a 19- to 20-year-old black man whose father held a good job at the plant. But the son could not get on at the mill and did piece work at low wages while he hoped for an opening. Her cab ride told her that her young driver was “intelligent and hard-working” and a young man who “possessed the values of his family,” and he “deserves a better future.” A job in steel, presumably. Why does he not have that high-paying job? Who or what fumbled away that young man’s future? Stein sensed, plausibly, that pursuing that question required the fusion of two fields of historical study that had been artificially and regrettably separated—civil rights and economic policy and history. Joining them might produce a “new narrative,” and an answer to the question about her driver. It certainly did produce an impressively researched book which indicts public policy for the sad fate of both steel and blacks like the taxi driver, policy conceived for the most part under Democratic presidents. Running Steel, Running America is built around the belief that governments have great capacity to do good, especially economic good. Since decent job opportunities as ladders of opportunity are within the national government’s power to deliver or maintain in place, lesser outcomes were the government’s fault. The book documents the default on that social responsibility, anchored in the author’s intimate familiarity with the evolution of the steel industry since World War II. Reading such a book in the late 1990s involves not just a trip to Birmingham and Sparrow’s Point and other places that make steel; it also has the feel of a trip back to the sixties. The New Left lives! The Liberals are responsible. [End Page 497] On closer examination, the author’s viewpoint is decidedly nineties. She sees good outcomes snatched from history by governmental policy, crushing the hopes of individuals and communities. And she has an explanation for it. To the New Left, the liberals bungled things because they were not staunch socialists. Here, liberal administrations, dutifully followed by the Republicans when they took a turn, sacrificed both steel and black (and white) workers on the alter of foreign economic policy—the religion of free trade, in the form of head-in-the-sand, foreigner-favoring, import-enhancing foreign economic policy. Pat Buchanan lives! Her topic is post-World War II U.S. industrial policy toward the nation’s crown jewel heavy industry, steel. To this she attaches a sort of parallel story of race relations and civil rights. The book begins in the 1950s, when two adverse developments turned big steel into a beleaguered, declining industry—hostile government policy arising from Eisenhower and then Kennedy and Johnson’s suspicion that oligopolistic steel (the industry) was a main cause of inflation, and import competition deriving from the expansion of steel capacity abroad. (I would have reversed these two causes of steel’s troubles and added managerial mistakes and inflexible labor costs due to the behavior of the unions, but Stein’s causation is external, nine parts federal government and one part foreign competition.) Quickly moving to the sixties, Stein traces the civil rights movement in Alabama with occasional references to the Fairfield plant, the two topics—steel and race—more side by side than intertwined. An intricate discussion of the evolution of civil rights policy affecting black employment, and the emergence of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is a prelude to a narrative of job discrimination complaints and politics...

Book: Review/Commentary: Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality

Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality, edited by Madeline Barbara Leons and Harry Sanabria (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), xii+310 pp., $19.95 (paper). Everyone agrees that a multidisciplinary approach is needed if we are to understand drug use and its outcomes. However, few have brought together such diverse and complementary perspectives as anthropologists Madeline Leons and Harry Sanabria, who focus-for a change-on a poor nation that produces the raw material. By telling us about what's happening in Bolivia, a country that hardly looms large in the worldview of most outsiders, the several contributors provide grassroots views that are rarely encountered, and show linkages between domestic and international, private and governmental, legal and illegal systems that are involved in transforming a traditional agricultural product into a valuable drug on streets halfway around the world. The authors of Coca, Cocaine, and the Bolivian Reality include specialists in history, economics, applied sociology, education, political science, ecology, and anthropology. All have lengthy experience in Bolivia. Each chapter is brief, well organized, and amply documented. The editors set the stage with a history of coca, with an emphasis on recent changes as other nations (especially the United States) progressively intervened with a war against drugs. Alison L. Spedding (a coca farmer and trader herself) contributes two chapters. In the first, she describes the growing and processing of coca in considerable detail, showing how it is intimately interwoven with the total fabric of values, social relationships, and other activities of the community. In her other chapter she chronicles the stormy struggle over control of the coca trade that has taken place since the 1970s, and describes forms of peasant resistance to recurrent national and international campaigns to eradicate coca. Elayne Zorn shows how seasonal migration from the overpopulated altiplano zone to the sparsely settled subtropical Chapare area, where coca has recently become a major cash crop, has changed traditional weaving and clothing styles in communities far removed from coca and cocaine. Ana Maria Lema traces the major role that large landowners in the Yungas region, where coca has been produced for domestic consumption since Inca times, played in shaping the modern Bolivian state. On the basis of her intimate familiarity with the area before and after the boom of the 1980s, Madeline Barbara Leons uses the Yungas as a case study demonstrating how and why campaigns to substitute other crops for coca have failed and are likely to continue to do so; peasants seem to understand agricultural economics better than bureaucrats do. …

On the Intrinsic Nature of States of Consciousness: James's Ubiquitous Feeling Aspect

Among problems psychologists of consciousness face is how to conceive of those mental states, events, or processes with which people have an intimate familiarity in their own case. Psychologists must not only determine the causal roles these occurrences play, but also their intrinsic properties. This article seeks to contribute to understanding what and how the conscious mental occurrences are in themselves, starting from W. James's conception of them, according to which every basic durational component of the stream, each successive state of consciousness, is an integral pulse of mentality possessing a feeling aspect and a cognitive aspect. Attention is also given to their reflexive aspect, wherein one has inner awareness of their occurrence and, often, of their type and content.

The dialogic emergence of culture Ed. by Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim (review)

432 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) through a corpus of 105 orthographic rulebooks outside the official Duden tradition published between 1855 and 1994, roughly sketching the impact of orthographic conferences on the transition from works with geographically or professionally limited currency to national orthographic standards. The work runs parallel to S's 1994 Systematische Bibliographie der deutschen Rechtschreibbücher, (Egelsbach, Frankfurt, & Washington, DC: Hänsel-Hohenhausen ) which establishes the relative chronology of these works. After outlining the plan of her book in the Einführung (1-5), S situates the study of orthographic rulebooks within the field of dictionary studies , 'Wörterbuchforschung', placing it within the relatively new subfield of 'Metalexikographie', or theoretical dictionary studies—as opposed to 'Lexikographie ' in a narrowed sense, referring to practical dictionary studies or dictionary creation (10)—in Ch. 1 (6-15). Ch. 2 (16-29) presents classification models of other authors as a counterpoint to S's own classification scheme for rulebooks, which unfortunately is not present in this work—readers are expected to have S's Systematische Bibliographie at hand and to draw their own comparisons. The most useful element ofthis chapter is the half-page section 2.2.3, 'Charakteristische Bausteine Orthographischer Regelbücher' (29), which defines the orthographic rulebook according to its essential elements: a substantial rules section ('Rechtschreibregelapparat') followed by a word list ('Wörterverzeichnis'). Ch. 3 (30-48) outlines the chronology and availability of S's source materials, though here again, her bibliography must be consulted in order to locate her sources. After briefly commenting on the intended audience for orthographic rulebooks m Ch. 4 (49-52), S launches into historical description, which constitutes the bulk ofthe work. Ch. 5 (53-60) sketches the German orthographic situation from the early nineteenth century through early attempts at unified standardization. Ch. 6 (61-89) takes a closer look at the municipal rulebooks of Hannover, Leipzig , and Berlin. Brief histories of two orthographic conferences (1876 and 1901) and their effects on orthographic standardization as reflected in various subsequent municipal and state rulebooks form the substance of Ch. 7 (90-96), Ch. 8 (97-128), and Ch. 9 (129-57). An aside into the reduction of multiple spellings in Ch. 10 (162-77) in rulebooks for official business (jurisprudence, post office) is followed by Ch. 11 (178-230), which covers the state rulebooks for Baden, Saxony, and Württemberg. Ch. 12 (23 1-32) introduces the continuation of the rulebook tradition in Switzerland (Ch. 13, 233-69) and Austria (Ch. 14, 270-95), where the tradition continues up to the present day. In four appendices (296-333) S presents comparative overviews of selected lemmata for various editions of a rulebook ( 1 and 2), for two rulebooks published in the same year (3), and of the rules section ofselected rulebooks (4). The work concludes with a bibliography (334-73) and indices (374-77). That this work is intended as a companion volume to S's bibliography explains its very broad scope. Yet in trying to say at least something about every rulebook the book dabbles along, forsaking theorizing , the clear outlining oftrends, and consistent comparative analysis of rulebook content or format for an unbalanced positivist description of unimportant details and presentations of data tables and issues of terminological debate without subsequent analysis or proposed resolutions. As a result the reader is left with a confused sense of why these works deserve our attention and what developments are to be witnessed in them. A clearer focus limited to certain elements mentioned or hinted at in the work—such as the comparison of rules sections as given in Appendix 4; a close examination of one development, e.g. the reduction of multiple spellings as begun in Ch. 10; or a longitudinal study of changes reflected in the Prussian rulebook (new editions from 1880 to 1969)—might have given the work greater coherence and made trends and the impact of the conferences clearer to the reader. Given that S has obviously put in much time gaining intimate familiarity with these materials, I hope that this will be her next step. [Désirée Baron, University of Regensburg.] The dialogic emergence of culture. Ed. by Dennis Tedlock...

The Triadic Moment: The Anti-Genealogy of Hellenist Marxism

[Extract] Some of the most powerful and least sentimental philosophy of the modern age has owed its bite to an intimate familiarity with the classical Mediterranean world. Nietzsche's tragic agon, Lukacs' epic totality and, Arendt's vita activa were signature ideas of a cast of brilliant minds, who - unlike liberal thinkers from Mill to Hayek to Ferry - kept their distance from the demoralizing and despritualizing drive of modernity, and yet did so in a was that was neither crusty nor reactionary nor pined for a golden age in the past. On the contrary, even paradoxically, there is an emphatically modern current that runs through their thinking. Less modern perhaps than Emile Durkheim for whom the autopoetic 'moralities' of differentiated professions seemed an adequate consolation for the deracination of life by contractual and utilitarian imperatives; but more modern than the other great 'founder' of social thought - Max Weber - who, while defending the 'realism' of the Durkheimian view that the best we have are strong professional moralities (vocations) and accepting the correlate of this (the polytheism of 'value' systems in the modern world) - seemed also to dream of a lost order in which geoscopic religious ethics held firm against the functional bureaucratic imperatives that dominate modern life. Somehow, for Weber, the choice of vocation was, in the end, not enough. He yearned for something more; at least this is what his meticulous investigations of Confucian, Buddhist, and Hindu ethics suggest.

The Original "Free Trade": Exchange of Botanical Products and Associated Plant Knowledge in Northwestern North America

Abstract: Long-standing and far-reaching trade networks for culturally important plants are documented for British Columbia and neighbouring areas from archaeological, historical and ethnographic records, as well as recollections of contemporary Aboriginal people. Plant resources and products manufactured from plants comprised a substantial portion of traditional and contemporary traded goods. Examples include: dried edible seaweed, commonly traded from coastal communities inland; dried soapberries, saskatoon berries and other berries; hazelnuts; cedar-root and cedar-bark baskets; basket materials; and Indian-hemp fibre and twine. In addition to the plant materials, knowledge associated with these resources was exchanged, and trade has had cultural and ecological implications extending well beyond simple subsistence.Resume: Dans cet article nous presentons les reseaux d'echange, de longue date et de grande portee, de plantes culturellement importantes de la Colombie britannique et de regions adjacentes a partir de sources archeologiques, historiques et ethnographiques et de souvenirs d'autochtones contemporains. Les ressources vegetales et les produits d'origine vegetale formaient une partie substantielle des produits echanges traditionnellement et de facon contemporaine. Les exemples presentes incluent: les algues marines comestibles sechees, echanges couramment entre les communautes de la cote et celles de l'interieur; les pommes de savon, les petites poires et autres petits fruits seches; les noisettes; les paniers en racine de cedre et en ecorce de cedre; les materiaux pour fabriquer les paniers; et la fibre et le fil du chanvre du Canada. En plus des materiaux d'origine vegetale, des connaissances associees a ces ressources etaient echangees. L'echange cut de nombreux effets cultureIs et ecologiques et n'etait pas restreint a la simple subsistance.Introduction Trade between villages was necessary to provide a continuous supply of food and accumulate wealth. Goods were exchanged by sharing, bartering, or trading a gift for a gift. Trade included sharing land that had a profusion of berries or hunting grounds full of game. As there was an abundance of seafood on the coast, and similarly, an excess of meat and berries among the Gitksans, the exchange offered variety in our diets. (Watts, 1997: 1)Indigenous peoples around the world have a cultural heritage that includes extensive and intimate familiarity with their local environments. Such knowledge is an essential attribute of societies that not only have survived, but have thrived, in close connection with the natural world (Inglis, 1993; Williams and Baines, 1993). However, few, if any, natural environments provide a complete and reliable array of resources to a given group of people at a given time. Trade has long been recognized as a means of countering instabilities in resource supply and abundance, and of introducing variety to those resources. Indigenous peoples of North America certainly have been well acquainted with the advantages of trade. Archaeological and historical records show that they developed extensive and sophisticated trading networks and institutions dating back thousands of years. However, the pervasive nature of Indigenous trade, and its many implications both before and after contact have rarely been explicitly considered. In particular, the importance of exchange of various types of plant resources, technologies and knowledge has received little direct attention.In this study, we discuss plant exchange, in a broad context, among Indigenous peoples of British Columbia and adjacent areas. General characteristics of this exchange are delineated, as well as its cultural and ecological significance both in the past and today. Information is derived from available archaeological, ethnographic and historical data, as well as documented consultations with Aboriginal people in recent decades. …

When the North Was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia

This short book is the culmination of a decade of work by two Canadian anthropologists who pioneered research into the lives of Siberian Aboriginal scholars and intellegentsia. In contrast to the recently growing list of ethnographic work by Western scholars of Siberia, their work is not based upon long-term, on-site, field research in an isolated rural setting nor an intimate familiarity with languages. However, with the exception of Humphrey (1983), it is one of the only accounts of Siberian indigenous identity and politics from the important period preceeding the crumbling of the Soviet Union.Bartels and Bartels conducted their field research in the early 1980s for the most part within the institutional environment of the Faculty of Northern Peoples of Hertzen State Pedagogical Institute. Located within the heart of urban Leningrad (St. Petersburg), this institution has been famous since the 1920s for its pivotal role in training Aboriginal cadres from all parts of the Siberian North in indigenous languages. The fact that on-site rural fieldwork was forbidden to the authors did not prevent them from meeting and interviewing representatives of some 20 Aboriginal nations; many of whom who have today become significant actors in Siberian Aboriginal-rights organizations.This work is rather special, some would say controversial, for the fact that Bartels and Bartels took seriously the loyalty and optimism of the students they encountered for Soviet socialist ideals. In the first chapter of the book, they rightly dismiss any discussion of assimilation or Russification as being inappropriate frames of analysis to account for the complexity of Soviet nationality policy. Instead, throughout the book, they explore two local concepts of national consolidation and Sovietization. The former concept refers to what may loosely be described as the Soviet state's affirmative action policy of encouraging representation and active participation from each of the officially recognized nations of this multinational state. The latter concept refers to this state's characteristic stress upon industrial and urban modes of life. Together the two policies combined in an attempt to provide modern housing, health care, education and occupations to all nations in a manner which did not threaten languages or costume (but impacted strongly upon other aspects of day-to-day life). This privileging of hegemonic discourse during a period of time when the Soviet state was at the apogee of its power may strike some readers as being either naive or uncritical. However, their ethnographic sensitivity to the goals of this subset of the Soviet intelligentsia has stood the test of time better than other works written in the sardonic genre of Sovietology. As members of the Siberian intelligentsia today look around at their native villages ravaged by the indifferent policies of market liberalization, they fondly recall the good times (rashee bylo luchshee) of the early 1980s documented in this work. …

The classical style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

This outstanding book treating the three most beloved composers of the Vienna School is basic to any study of Classical-era music. Drawing on his rich experience and intimate familiarity with the works of these giants, Charles Rosen presents his keen insights in clear and persuasive language.

Fibreoptic intubation

Although not widely utilized, fibreoptic techniques represent a dramatic advance in the management of the difficult intubation. Particularly suited to the awake patient in the elective setting, fibreoptic intubation can also be useful in selected emergency situations, and can be done under general anaesthesia. In the awake patient fibreoptic intubation maintains a wide margin of safety while producing minimal patient discomfort, but requires adequate local anaesthesia of the airway. Intimate familiarity with the bronchoscope and the anatomy of the upper airway is essential as is careful attention to various aspects of technique. Intubation mannequins can be readily utilized to develop dexterity in bronchoscopic manipulation and intubation workshops are also effective in improving skills. This CME article provides the clinician with a detailed approach to the technique of fibreoptic intubation based on the author's personal experience supplemented by a limited literature review. Fibreoptic intubation is not a difficult skill to master and should be in the armamentarium of all practising anaesthetists.

Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950-1970.

Here is one of the great stories in American urban history told by a great historian. In 1949, Boston was 'a hopeless backwater' . . . by 1970, a 'New Boston' had been created . . . Thomas O'Connor, the dean of Boston historians, brings to this tale of transformation rich learning, intimate familiarity with his subject, and a lucid sometimes witty pen. -- Jack Beatty, Senior Editor, Atlantic Monthly