non-European Settings Research Articles

Between “Chaos” and “Order”: The Czech Anthropologist and his Experience in the Changes of Time

The main purpose of this text is to show how complex and long the disciplination or disciplinary practice of an anthropologist conducting his fieldwork in non-European areas can be. In the first part, the text is very much retrospective. I focus on my long formative period, during which my ideas about becoming a full-time ethnologist were born in a kind of unconscious vacuum. I revisit my first field entry among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri) people of northwestern Mexico and attempt to bring the reader up to speed on my determined efforts to reach out to native communities and my chaotic actions during this first field experience in a non-European setting as a then third-year ethnology student. This will be followed by a reflection on my next two field researches among the Tarahumara in 1996 and 2001, the first of which resulted in an M. A. thesis and the second in a dissertation. In this section, I try to show a certain shift in the approach to fieldwork, which was no longer mere chaos, but led to a more systematic organization of fieldwork findings and their elaboration into a more extensive qualifying thesis and several technical studies. While in the first part I go back into the deep past in order to show the complexities that a budding ethnologist can or must deal with if he wants to penetrate a completely different environment from his own, in the second part I discuss some of the methods of field research that I have not been familiar with in the past, or have used unconsciously or without better understanding of them. These I find useful in current and forthcoming return research among the Tarahumara. They resonate strongly in contemporary anthropology, and are constantly being refined. In this section I will also outline, with respect to methodological horizons, my current planned research project focusing on the human relationship to biodiversity in the context of environmental and climate change, which is increasingly impacting (not only) Tarahumara communities.

Flânerie in Valerie Tagwira’s The Uncertainty of Hope

Valerie Tagwira’s debut novel The Uncertainty of Hope, set in Harare in 2005, depicts the city on the brink of collapse, characterized by the effects of economic crisis and political violence against the urban poor. Political marginalization of the working classes and gender-based violence intersect and diminish the prospects for the social and spatial mobility of the urban poor. In this article I apply the lens of flânerie to the pedestrian movements of Tagwira’s protagonist Onai Moyo, an impoverished woman who makes a living by selling vegetables on Harare’s streets. In order to make a case for Onai’s ‘flânerie against all odds’, I revisit Walter Benjamin’s theorization as well as recent scholarly engagements with flânerie in non-European settings. By giving her protagonist a gaze traditionally associated with a European middle-class urbanity of the 19th century, Tagwira expands a tradition of city writing/walking and, like other contemporary engagements with flânerie, also breathes new life into a concept often pronounced inappropriate or unproductive for readings of non-European literature.

Using autopoiesis to discover the birth of fashion

How personal and social fashion might be formed at a nascent level is detectable in the Mursi and Omo people. These groups remained within the African continent after its post-Pangaea formation; the Mursi and Omo have retained practices and beliefs that hitherto have not been considered critical to the formation of fashion. Fashion scholarship has followed a limited version of history that permeates museology, teaching and fashion design. Its impetus responds to the idea that fashion was formed in Bruges, Belgium, during the birth of capitalism, between 1280 and 1390. Clothes created before 1280 in non-European settings has generally been regarded as costume, hence the epistemological gap that stymies an inclusivity scholarship. This development has ramifications for a reconsideration of when the historical gaze commences, and where geographically it falls. Indeed, fashion is reconsidered to be inordinately autochthonous. This is an examination of post-structuralism as applied to a visual system via human presentation and social autopoiesis, a system that reproduces itself and does so without requiring external operations for the system for continuation. The activity of fashion visualized is examined as a claim of a live system that stresses the study of the individual and the group as an activity for self-actualization. The relative freedom in which the Mursi and Omo peoples of Ethiopia create fashion is discussed as opposed to the lack of autonomy available to formal fashion designers working in the West and particularly those being trained and educated in fashion schools. This article refutes Barthesian concepts of fashion for three reasons. First, Barthes grounded his scope within the venture of the fashion industrial complex and its profit agenda, served by mechanisms such as fashion photography, advertising and promotion. Second, Barthes’ work concerns an exposition of semiotics where fashion is merely the subject of containment. Lastly, the establishment of fashion is a creative act concerning the human body, since no evidence can be proffered to decipher which came first – human making marks on the land, trees or cave walls, or mark-making on live human skin. I proceed with the idea that the Omo provide a glimpse of the birth of fashion in that they make the step of distancing themselves from nature by re-creating themselves as objectified and in the world.

INCULTURATION: BLENDING CHRISTIANITY INTO LOCAL CULTURE

As Christianity seeks to spread its mission around the world, they face cultural barriers in a way that Christianity is not always easily acceptable to the non-European settings due to the differences in values and cultural practices. In order to cope with such challenges, the churches established inculturation and equivalent policies in evangelizing and minister the non-western communities worldwide. In Kampung Bungan Besar, Matu, a Melanau-populated village, Christianity at the present time is the main religion alongside with the minority practitioners of traditional belief. The growing of Christianity from a totally ‘foreign’ religion to the main religion among the Melanau can be associated with the missionary efforts, and it is the inculturation process that ensured the triumph of the mission. Liturgical inculturation and object-centered inculturation is the most obvious two inculturation strategies used in spreading of the gospel message among the Melanau.

The Prophecy and Crisis of October

What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twentieth-century revolutionary movements have for contemporary projects of liberation? This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the complex legacies and contributions of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, considered as the two decisive revolutionary moments of the twentieth century. The author calls for us to reposition the Russian Revolution outside of a Eurocentric frame by examining the ways that Lenin and other revolutionaries thought about Russia through the lens of radical upsurges in China, as well as the possibilities the Russian Revolution opened for revolutionary nationalists in China and other colonized societies. Breaking from a Western Marxist discourse of failure, therefore, this essay takes the relationship between the Russian Revolution and global projects of self-determination and anticolonialism as a historical trajectory of emancipation, one that has been marginalized within existing accounts. In this sense, the Russian Revolution opened up a series of decolonizing possibilities whose repercussions echoed through the century. Drawing from the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution opened the possibility of a reconceptualization of the revolutionary subject itself, one in which the category of “the people” (renmin) performed the role of a revolutionary subject always in transformation, critically grounded in the peasantry as the appropriate base of revolutionary mobilization in non-European settings. It did so through the real political practice of “People’s War” (renmin zhanzheng), which, as a form of sustained rural insurgency, embodied a temporality and strategy of revolution very different from the urban insurrectionary model of the Russian Revolution. This essay allows us to situate these and other revolutionary processes at the center of the twentieth century and to study them anew as sources of emancipatory thought and practice, against attempts to banish revolution as such from the stage of history and political possibility. In doing so, this article enjoins us to dream that the world might once again be turned upside down.

Psychological interventions for diabetes-related distress in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Many adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) experience a psychosocial burden and mental health problems associated with the disease. Diabetes-related distress (DRD) has distinct effects on self-care behaviours and disease control. Improving DRD in adults with T2DM could enhance psychological well-being, health-related quality of life, self-care abilities and disease control, also reducing depressive symptoms. To assess the effects of psychological interventions for diabetes-related distress in adults with T2DM. We searched the Cochrane Library, MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, CINAHL, BASE, WHO ICTRP Search Portal and ClinicalTrials.gov. The date of the last search was December 2014 for BASE and 21 September 2016 for all other databases. We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) on the effects of psychological interventions for DRD in adults (18 years and older) with T2DM. We included trials if they compared different psychological interventions or compared a psychological intervention with usual care. Primary outcomes were DRD, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and adverse events. Secondary outcomes were self-efficacy, glycosylated haemoglobin A1c (HbA1c), blood pressure, diabetes-related complications, all-cause mortality and socioeconomic effects. Two review authors independently identified publications for inclusion and extracted data. We classified interventions according to their focus on emotion, cognition or emotion-cognition. We performed random-effects meta-analyses to compute overall estimates. We identified 30 RCTs with 9177 participants. Sixteen trials were parallel two-arm RCTs, and seven were three-arm parallel trials. There were also seven cluster-randomised trials: two had four arms, and the remaining five had two arms. The median duration of the intervention was six months (range 1 week to 24 months), and the median follow-up period was 12 months (range 0 to 12 months). The trials included a wide spectrum of interventions and were both individual- and group-based.A meta-analysis of all psychological interventions combined versus usual care showed no firm effect on DRD (standardised mean difference (SMD) -0.07; 95% CI -0.16 to 0.03; P = 0.17; 3315 participants; 12 trials; low-quality evidence), HRQoL (SMD 0.01; 95% CI -0.09 to 0.11; P = 0.87; 1932 participants; 5 trials; low-quality evidence), all-cause mortality (11 per 1000 versus 11 per 1000; risk ratio (RR) 1.01; 95% CI 0.17 to 6.03; P = 0.99; 1376 participants; 3 trials; low-quality evidence) or adverse events (17 per 1000 versus 41 per 1000; RR 2.40; 95% CI 0.78 to 7.39; P = 0.13; 438 participants; 3 trials; low-quality evidence). We saw small beneficial effects on self-efficacy and HbA1c at medium-term follow-up (6 to 12 months): on self-efficacy the SMD was 0.15 (95% CI 0.00 to 0.30; P = 0.05; 2675 participants; 6 trials; low-quality evidence) in favour of psychological interventions; on HbA1c there was a mean difference (MD) of -0.14% (95% CI -0.27 to 0.00; P = 0.05; 3165 participants; 11 trials; low-quality evidence) in favour of psychological interventions. Our included trials did not report diabetes-related complications or socioeconomic effects.Many trials were small and were at high risk of bias for incomplete outcome data as well as possible performance and detection biases in the subjective questionnaire-based outcomes assessment, and some appeared to be at risk of selective reporting. There are four trials awaiting further classification. These are parallel RCTs with cognition-focused and emotion-cognition focused interventions. There are another 18 ongoing trials, likely focusing on emotion-cognition or cognition, assessing interventions such as diabetes self-management support, telephone-based cognitive behavioural therapy, stress management and a web application for problem solving in diabetes management. Most of these trials have a community setting and are based in the USA. Low-quality evidence showed that none of the psychological interventions would improve DRD more than usual care. Low-quality evidence is available for improved self-efficacy and HbA1c after psychological interventions. This means that we are uncertain about the effects of psychological interventions on these outcomes. However, psychological interventions probably have no substantial adverse events compared to usual care. More high-quality research with emotion-focused programmes, in non-US and non-European settings and in low- and middle-income countries, is needed.

PARALLELS AND CONTRASTS IN GENDERED HISTORIES OF INDUSTRIAL LABOUR IN BURSA AND BOMBAY 1850–1910

AbstractTextile manufacturing in India and the Ottoman Empire transformed fundamentally in the nineteenth century, when mass-produced goods imported from Europe permeated local markets. Faced with increasing competition from abroad, local producers changed their techniques, materials, designs, and target customers. At the same time, processing industries emerged in places with intense mercantile activity, introducing new meanings, relations, and patterns of work. This article investigates the role played by gender in the shaping of labour markets and class politics in two export-oriented industries that developed simultaneously: the silk-reeling industry in Bursa and the cotton-spinning industry in Bombay. It shows that the secondary economic value attributed to women's work, combined with rural connections of workers, brought down wages and subsidized capitalist profits in both sectors. Within the emerging industrial workforce, ideas about appropriate roles for women and men provided the vocabulary and constituted boundaries of class politics. Bringing gender into the debate of industrial development and class, the article reveals parallels and contrasts in two non-European settings that are rarely compared in the existing historiographies.

Validity of prescribing indicators for assessing quality of antibiotic use in Australian general practice.

The aim of this study was to assess the validity of a set of European quality indicators for assessing antimicrobial prescribing in Australian General Practice. A modified UCLA/RAND appropriateness method was used to assess the validity of 30 antimicrobial prescribing indicators. An expert panel of 12 general practitioners scored the validity of each indicator for measuring quality in Australian general practice. Four quality domains were considered: monitoring antibiotic resistance, benefit to individual patients, value for money and value to policymakers. Panelmembers were also asked to comment on the relevance to the Australian context and proposed benchmarks for each indicator. All panel members were in agreement regarding the validity of each indicator in each of the specified domains with exception of the indicator assessing the use of systemic antibiotics for pneumonia. The majority of the indicators and their associated benchmarks were considered valid for assessing quality in Australian General Practice, however, there were differences regarding the quality domain that each indicator was considered valid for. Monitoring quality considering individual patient benefit was the most problematic domain with respect to validity. This study demonstrates the validity of 30 European indicators for assessing quality of antimicrobial prescribing in general practice in a non-European setting and provides guidance regarding acceptable benchmarks for the indicators. With international concerns regarding misuse of antibiotics and global interest in prescribing quality, valid evidence-based antimicrobial prescribing indicators and associated benchmarks are an essential tool for assessing prescribing quality.

Meta-analysis:LactobacillusGG for treating acute gastroenteritis in children - updated analysis of randomised controlled trials

The efficacy of each probiotic should be evaluated separately. Previously, we have shown that Lactobacillus GG (LGG) is effective in treating acute gastroenteritis (AGE) in children. To update our 2007 meta-analysis on the effectiveness of LGG in treating AGE in children. The Cochrane Library, MEDLINE and EMBASE databases were searched from August 2006 (end date of last search) to May 2013, with no language restrictions, for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses. Fifteen RCTs (2963 participants) met the inclusion criteria in this updated meta-analysis. Combined data from 11 RCTs (n = 2444) showed that LGG significantly reduced the duration of diarrhoea compared with placebo or no treatment (mean difference, MD -1.05 days, 95% CI -1.7 to -0.4). LGG was more effective when used at a daily dose ≥10¹⁰ CFU (eight RCTs, n = 1488, MD -1.11 days, 95% CI -1.91 to -0.31) than when used at a daily dose <10¹⁰ CFU (three RCTs, n = 956, MD -0.9 day, 95% CI -2.5 to 0.69). LGG was effective in children treated in Europe (five RCTs, n = 744, MD -1.27 days, 95% CI -2.04 to -0.49); in the non-European setting, the difference between the LGG group and the control group was of a borderline statistical significance (six RCTs, n = 1700, MD -0.87, 95% CI -1.81 to 0.08). Lactobacillus GG reduces the duration of diarrhoea. A subset of patients that is more likely to benefit includes subjects treated with a high daily dose of LGG (≥10¹⁰ CFU/day) who are either in-patients or out-patients from geographical Europe. Given the methodological limitations of many of the included trials, the evidence should be viewed with caution.

International epidemiology of human pre-existing adenovirus (Ad) type-5, type-6, type-26 and type-36 neutralizing antibodies: Correlates of high Ad5 titers and implications for potential HIV vaccine trials

Replication-defective adenoviruses have been utilized as candidate HIV vaccine vectors. Few studies have described the international epidemiology of pre-existing immunity to adenoviruses. We enrolled 1904 participants in a cross-sectional serological survey at seven sites in Africa, Brazil, and Thailand to assess neutralizing antibodies (NA) for adenovirus types Ad5, Ad6, Ad26 and Ad36. Clinical trial samples were used to assess NA titers from the US and Europe. The proportions of participants that were negative were 14.8% (Ad5), 31.5% (Ad6); 41.2% (Ad26) and 53.6% (Ad36). Adenovirus NA titers varied by geographic location and were higher in non-US and non-European settings, especially Thailand. In multivariate logistic regression analysis, geographic setting (non-US and non-European settings) was statistically significantly associated with having higher Ad5 titers; participants from Thailand had the highest odds of having high Ad5 titers (adjusted OR=3.53, 95% CI: 2.24, 5.57). Regardless of location, titers of Ad5NA were the highest and Ad36 NA were the lowest. Coincident Ad5/6 titers were lower than either Ad5 or Ad6 titers alone. Understanding pre-existing immunity to candidate vaccine vectors may contribute to the evaluation of vaccines in international populations.

Does breastfeeding protect against childhood overweight? Hong Kong's 'Children of 1997' birth cohort

Observational studies from mainly Western settings suggest breastfeeding may protect against childhood adiposity; however, breastfeeding and adiposity share social patterning potentially generating confounding, making evidence from other settings valuable. We used multivariable linear regression to examine the prospective adjusted associations of breastfeeding with body mass index (BMI), height and weight z-scores at 7 years of age relative to the 2007 World Health Organization (WHO) growth reference, in a large (n = 8327), population-representative Hong Kong Chinese birth cohort, recruited between April and May 1997 with high follow-up (n = 7026). Low socio-economic position (SEP) was associated with never breastfeeding and with exclusive breastfeeding for > or =3 months. We did not find any association between breastfeeding and BMI [z-score mean difference 0.07, 95% confidence interval (CI) -0.05 to 0.19], height (0.02, 95% CI -0.07 to 0.11) or weight (0.07, 95% CI -0.05 to 0.18), adjusted for sex, birth weight, gestational age, SEP, second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure, parity, mother's age at birth, mother's place of birth and serious infant morbidity. In a non-European setting, breastfeeding was not associated with child adiposity, suggesting that observed protective effects may be due to socially patterned confounding by SEP, maternal adiposity and maternal smoking.

Modern by analogy: modernity, Shoah and the Tasmanian genocide

One of the themes developed in this article concerns the consolidation of modernity in Tasmania, an island state member of the national federation of Australia. The process of social change and transformation designated by that term is now widely regarded as world-historical. But along with the recognition that modernity remains a salient tool with which to theorise the social realities of the contemporary world has come a tendency to use the concept as if it applied to an originary set of social events that are only ever replicated in non-European settings (see particularly Giddens, 1990; Habermas, 1987). In fact, it will be shown that modernities exist firmly in the plural. As Dilip Gaonkar argues in Alternative Modernities, different time–space locations produce their own specific modernities, alike but ultimately irreducible to the original European version. This study, then, charts the functioning of one of those alternative modernities, but in doing so gestures outwards to the many different sets of socio-cultural configurations that are known by that name. For readers without an interest in or a prior knowledge of Tasmanian history, this argument might be taken as a kind of instantiative study, an analysis of the different paths to modernity within a given spatio-temporal configuration, but ultimately, not restricted to that immediate place. For anyone else, it can be taken as a kind of cultural history of a specific aspect of this intriguing island’s passage to the present. Colonial genocide, which forms the other topos of the investigation here, is only now becoming more fashionable as a research topic, as evidenced by the arrival of the Journal of Genocide Research. The Holocaust, of course, remains at the top of the list of topics to study in the Western humanities. The significance of genocide for an understanding of one’s own civility is unprecedented, and the Tasmanian instance that is catalogued here is only made the more interesting by virtue of its intensity, completeness and rapidity. The conjuncture between genocide and modernity needs to be considered by anyone interested in the process of social development and the idea of moral progress. Unless one becomes fully informed about this horrific topic, one cannot be sure that one will remain alert to its reappearance. And this of course would be a monumental tragedy.

The Stoneware Kilns of Sisatchanalai and Early Modern Thailand

Little is known about the transition to the Modern Economy in non-European settings. Southeast Asia provides a rare opportunity to evaluate this transition through analysis of the tradeware production system that operated at the site of Sisatchanalai in central northern Thailand. Sisatchanalai is the largest and longest lived (A.C. 1100–1650) stoneware production complex in continental Southeast Asia. Based on the timing and nature of changes in tradeware production, we suggest that the political and economic structures present in Thailand during this era precluded its incorporation into the European periphery. Like Japan and China, Thailand successfully defined its own terms for subsequent European interaction.

The introduction of chemical theories into nineteenth-century China

Summary The introduction of Western chemical theories was a landmark in the development of modern science in China. The way such theories were introduced and assimilated not only illustrates the historical circumstances of the transmission and development of modern science in China, but also reflects the conflict between modern scientific concepts and traditional values in a non-European setting. The major part of the most important theories were introduced into China by 1901 and became the fundamental materials for building the subject. These theories and concepts were fresh to the Chinese and inevitably made a significant impact and influence which extended beyond the development of the science itself.