The puzzle of Buruli ulcer transmission, ethno-ecological history and the end of "love" in the Akonolinga district, Cameroon.

The "One World One Health Initiative" has attended little to the priorities, concepts and practices of resource-poor communities confronting disease and the implications of these concerns for its biomedical, ecological and institutional approach to disease surveillance and control. Using the example of Buruli ulcer (BU) and its bacterial etiology, Mycobacterium ulcerans, in south-central Cameroon, we build on debates about the contributions of "local knowledge" and "alternative models" to biomedical knowledge of disease transmission. BU's mode of transmission remains poorly understood. Our approach employs ethno-ecological histories - local understandings of the putative emergence and expansion of a locally important, neglected disease. We develop these histories from 52 individual and small group interviews, group discussions, and participant-observation of daily and seasonal activities, conducted in 2013-2013. These histories offer important clues about past environmental and social change that should guide further ecological, epidemiological research. They highlight a key historical moment (the late 1980s and 1990s); specific ecological transformations; new cultivation practices in unexploited zones that potentially increased exposure to M. ulcerans; and ecological degradation that may have lowered nutritional standards and heightened susceptibility to BU. They also recast transmission, broadening insight into BU and its local analog, atom, by emphasizing the role of social change and economic crisis in its emergence and expansion.

The deployment of ethnographic sciences and psychological warfare during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion.

This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts, seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the times of "emergency." The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku Mutua and other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many journalists today have commented on the recovery of "lost" colonial archives and the denials of former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers, Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the commentaries on the "Mau Mau" mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past injustices.

Producing ethnographies: workplace ethnographies in history.

Data on a large set of workplace ethnographies published from 1940 to 2002, compiled by Randy Hodson, are analyzed to show the trends over time in the production of such ethnographic work, its shifting disciplinary base, the relevance of the personal backgrounds of its authors, the contributions made by academic amateurs, the changing roles of gender and political stances, and the nature of different routes to publication. The definition of what counts as an ethnography is important to the character of the set available and has implications for its potential uses in secondary analysis. It is found that both personal and disciplinary identities and wider social factors have played roles in the production of ethnographic work that need to be understood to account for its history, though it is to be expected that the forms these take will differ for work in different subfields.

Medicinas indígenas e as políticas da tradição: entre discursos oficiais e vozes indígenas / Indigenous medicine and the politics of tradition: between official speeches and indigenous voices

Compreender o processo de emergência das medicinas tradicionais indígenas no campo das políticas públicas de saúde indígena é o objetivo deste livro, que analisa os discursos proferidos por uma diversidade de atores ­ indígenas e não indígenas, governamentais e não governamentais, nacionais e internacionais. Dessa forma, a obra revela uma dinâmica que vai do global e ao local, e transforma os contextos envolvidos, originando novas formações culturais. As políticas públicas que qualificam os seus objetos e público-alvo com a categoria 'tradição' conformam uma formação discursiva, definida pela autora como 'políticas da tradição'. Um exemplo são as políticas voltadas à saúde indígena, que têm buscado reconhecer a eficácia das medicinas tradicionais indígenas e articulá-las com o sistema oficial de saúde. No entanto, "ao serem apropriados pelos povos indígenas, os discursos oficiais são postos a serviço dos seus interesses culturalmente situados ­ assim, estamos diante do fenômeno da indigenização", diz a pesquisadora. E essa 'indigenização' se refere aos processos "levados a efeito pelos povos indígenas ao se apropriarem das políticas públicas a fim de manter a sua autonomia e reverter a seu favor o controle que o Estado passa a exercer sobre o mundo da vida de suas comunidades". O livro busca contribuir para a consolidação do direito indígena à atenção diferenciada à sua saúde, considerando as relações historicamente construídas entre povos indígenas e Estado.

Fat, desire and disgust in the colonial imagination.

This article tracks the relatively unexamined ways in which ethnographic, travel and medical knowledge interrelated in the construction of fat stereotypes in the nineteenth century, often plotted along a temporal curve from 'primitive' corpulence to 'civilized' moderation. By showing how the complementary insights of medicine and ethnography circulated in beauty manuals, weight-loss guides and popular ethnographic books ­ all of which were aimed at middle-class readers and thus crystallize certain bourgeois attitudes of the time ­ it argues that the pronounced denigration of fat that emerged in Britain and France by the early twentieth century acquired some of its edge through this ongoing tendency to depict desire for and acceptance of fat as fundamentally 'savage' or 'uncivilized' traits. This tension between fat and 'civilization' was by no means univocal or stable. Rather, this analysis shows, a complex and wide-ranging series of similarities and differences, identifications and refusals can be traced between British and French perceptions of their own bodies and desires and the shortcomings they saw in foreign cultures. It sheds light as well on those aspects of their own societies that seemed 'primitive' in ways that bore an uncomfortable similarity to the colonial peoples they governed, demonstrating how a gendered, yet ultimately unstable, double standard was sustained for much of the nineteenth century. Finally it reveals a subtle and persistent racial subtext to the anti-fat discourses that would become more aggressive in the twentieth century and which are ubiquitous today.

Cattle cults of the Arabian Neolithic and early territorial societies.

At the cusp of food production, Near Eastern societies adopted new territorial practices, including archaeologically visible sedentism and nonsedentary social defenses more challenging to identify archaeologically. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence for Arabia's earliest-known sacrifices points to territorial maintenance in arid highland southern Yemen. Here sedentism was not an option prior to agriculture. Seasonally mobile pastoralists developed alternate practices to reify cohesive identities, maintain alliances, and defend territories. Archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence implies cattle sacrifices were commemorated with a ring of more than 42 cattle skulls and a stone platform buried by 6,400-year-old floodplain sediments. Associated with numerous hearths, these cattle rites suggest feasting by a large gathering, with important sociopolitical ramifications for territories. A GIS analysis of the early Holocene landscape indicates constrained pasturage supporting small resident human populations. Cattle sacrifice in southern Arabia suggests a model of mid-Holocene Neolithic territorial pastoralism under environmental and cultural conditions that made sedentism unsusta

Consuming the forest in an environment of crisis: nature tourism, forest conservation and neoliberal agriculture in south India.

This article engages ethnographically with the neoliberalization of nature in the spheres of tourism, conservation and agriculture. Drawing on a case study of Wayanad district, Kerala, the article explores a number of themes. First, it shows how a boom in domestic nature tourism is currently transforming Wayanad into a landscape for tourist consumption. Second, it examines how tourism in Wayanad articulates with projects of neoliberalizing forest and wildlife conservation and with their contestations by subaltern groups. Third, it argues that the contemporary commodification of nature in tourism and conservation is intimately related to earlier processes of commodifying nature in agrarian capitalism. Since independence, forest land has been violently appropriated for intensive cash-cropping. Capitalist agrarian change has transformed land into a (fictitious) commodity and produced a fragile and contested frontier of agriculture and wildlife. When agrarian capitalism reached its ecological limits and entered a crisis of accumulation, farming became increasingly speculative, exploring new modes of accumulation in out-of-state ginger cultivation. In this scenario nature and wildlife tourism emerges as a new prospect for accumulation in a post-agrarian economy. The neoliberalization of nature in Wayanad, the authors argue, is a process driven less by new modes of regulation than by the agrarian crisis and new modes of speculative farming.

Women performers and prostitutes in Medieval India.

Music and dance, the esoteric performing arts, were markers of culture in medieval India. A number of these differing forms developed into well-recognized and reputed arts over time. The practitioners were, accordingly, regarded as agents of refinement and culture. At the same time, music and dance were also among the most popular forms of entertainment and physical pleasure. This aspect remained crucial in classifying musicians, singers and dancers as entertainers, alongside prostitutes. While the labelling together might have reduced the status of performers at times, the labelling hardly remained fixed. Certain practitioners, even if involved in practices otherwise considered immoral, could remain within the elite circle, while for others the 'evil' characteristics got emphasized. There were, within the class of women who prostituted themselves, courtesans trained in the skills of music and dancing and educated in the fine arts, who were treated more as embodiments of culture. These categories­artists, skilled entertainers, courtesans­were quite fluid, with the boundaries seemingly fused together. Still, there were certainly some distinctions among the categories and those did not totally disappear, affording sanctity and purity to certain kinds of performers and allowing them to claim distinctiveness. Notably, the class of courtesans clearly stood apart from the common prostitutes. The attempt in this article is to look at different categories of women performers and prostitutes, their apparent coalescing boundaries and specialities as a separate group, their societal position, their shifting roles and the changes that affected their status. In this, it is worthwhile to consider the state's attitude towards them, besides societal views that remained quite diverse.

The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London.

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain, but was a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century. Although vaccination was crucial to the decline of smallpox, especially in urban areas, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it remains disputed the extent to which smallpox mortality declined before vaccination. Analysis of age-specific changes in smallpox burials within the large west London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields revealed a precipitous reduction in adult smallpox risk from the 1770s, and this pattern was duplicated in the east London parish of St Dunstan's. Most adult smallpox victims were rural migrants, and such a drop in their susceptibility is consistent with a sudden increase in exposure to smallpox in rural areas. We investigated whether this was due to the spread of inoculation, or an increase in smallpox transmission, using changes in the age patterns of child smallpox burials. Smallpox mortality rose among infants, and smallpox burials became concentrated at the youngest ages, suggesting a sudden increase in infectiousness of the smallpox virus. Such a change intensified the process of smallpox endemicization in the English population, but also made cities substantially safer for young adult migrants.

Lonely drinking fountains and comforting coolers: paradoxes of water value and ironies of water use.

This article focuses ethnographically on Americans and technologies of drinking water, as tokens of and vehicles for health, agency, and surprising kinds of community. Journalists and water scholars have argued that bottled water is a material concomitant of privatization and alienation in U.S. society. But, engaging Latour, this research shows that water technologies and the groups they assemble, are plural. Attention to everyday entwining of workplace lives with drinking fountains, single-serve bottles, and spring water coolers shows us several different quests, some individualized, some alienated, but some seeking health via public, collective care, acknowledgment of stakeholding, and community organizing. Focused on water practices on a college campus, in the roaring 1990s and increasingly sober 2000s in the context of earlier U.S. water histories of inclusion and exclusion, I draw on ethnographic research from the two years that led up to the recession and the presidential election of 2008. I argue for understanding of water value through attention to water use, focusing both on the social construction of water and the use of water for social construction.

Art, class and gender in Joseon dynasty Korea: representations of lower-class women by the scholar-painter Yun Duseo.

This paper examines several pioneering genre paintings by the important scholar painter Yun Duseo (1668-1715), with its focus on their artistic sources which have not yet been explored so far. Painted on ramie, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is one of the most intriguing examples among Yun Duseo's oeuvre, which encompasses a broad variety of themes, including genre imagery, landscapes, portraits, dragons, and horses. Even among Yun Duseo's genre paintings, 'Women Picking Potherbs' is extraordinary, as recent scholarship regards it as the earliest independent representation of lower-class women in the history of Korean art. In particular, Yun Duseo painted two women who were working ourdoors to gather spring potherbs. In a conservative Confucian society, it was extraordinary women who were working outdoors. Hence, Yun Duseo occupies a highly important place in Korean painting. Furthermore, even though Yun Duseo came from the upper-class, he often painted images of lower class people working. It is possible that Yun Duseo was familiar with the book titled "Tian gong kai wu" (Exploitation of the Works of Nature) which was published in the 17th century. By identifying the probable body of his artistic sources in the book known as "Tian gong kai wu," it will be possible to assess the innovations and limitations found in 'Women Picking Potherbs'.

Agricultural illustrations of 19th century Korea: 'Imwon gyeongjeji' (Treatises on Management of Forest and Garden) by Seo Yugu.

The generative relationship between text and image has long been established. Its structure evolved historically as a result of varying understandings of the functions of art and technology. Agriculture illustration, which emerged in China during the Song dynasty, is a prime example of this creative dialogue in which aspects of both disciplines were combined. Political, technological, and aesthetic concerns informed the reformulations of this new genre. This paper will address agricultural illustrations on nineteenth-century Korea, when notable changes occurred in the visualization of agricultural texts. It will explore changes in the understanding of the roles of agriculture, technology, and labor through an analysis of shifts in modes of illustration and the texts selected. The relationship between technology and visual representations during late Joseon Korea will be contextualized through an exploration of the evolution of technical drawing in East Asia. This paper will suggest that the recognition of imagery's ability to convey textual and technical information provided an important alternative paradigm for the presentation and use of knowledge.

Of poisoners, tanners and the British Raj: redefining Chamar identity in colonial North India, 1850­90.

This article explores colonial representations of the crime of cattle poisoning and uses it as a starting point to investigate questions related to the formation of Chamar identity. Starting from the 1850s, it looks at the process whereby the caste group was imbued with certain undesirable traits of character. Simultaneously, it also explores the larger trend towards fixing the caste with certain occupational traits, so that it began to be identified completely with leather work by late nineteenth century. The role of new specialisms such as ethnography, toxicology and medical jurisprudence in the formation of new definitions about Chamars is also highlighted. The overall aim of the article is to reveal the complexities involved in the formation of colonial discourse about caste and caste groups.

The politics of urban informality in Philadelphia's recovery house movement.

There are some 60,000 vacant properties in the city of Philadelphia, 30,000 of which are abandoned row houses. In the neighbourhood of Kensington, street-level entrepreneurs have reconfigured hundreds of former working-class row homes to produce the Philadelphia recovery house movement: an extra-legal poverty survival strategy for addicts and alcoholics located in the city's poorest and most heavily blighted zones. The purpose of this paper is to explore, ethnographically, the ways in which informal poverty survival mechanisms articulate with the restructuring of the contemporary welfare state and the broader political economy of Philadelphia. It is argued that recovery house networks accommodate an interrelated set of political rationalities animated not only by retrenchment and the churning of welfare bodies, but also by the agency of informal operators and the politics of self-help. Working as an alternative and partially vestigial boundary institution or buffer zone to formal regimes of governance, the recovery house movement reflects the 'other story' of the new urban politics in Philadelphia.

The evolution of human warfare.

Here we propose a new theory for the origins and evolution of human warfare as a complex social phenomenon involving several behavioral traits, including aggression, risk taking, male bonding, ingroup altruism, outgroup xenophobia, dominance and subordination, and territoriality, all of which are encoded in the human genome. Among the family of great apes only chimpanzees and humans engage in war; consequently, warfare emerged in their immediate common ancestor that lived in patrilocal groups who fought one another for females. The reasons for warfare changed when the common ancestor females began to immigrate into the groups of their choice, and again, during the agricultural revolution.

The potato's contribution to population and urbanization: evidence from a historical experiment.

We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization. Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to our most conservative estimates, the introduction of the potato accounts for approximately one-quarter of the growth in Old World population and urbanization between 1700 and 1900. Additional evidence from within-country comparisons of city populations and adult heights also confirms the cross-country findings.

Toward a comprehensive demography: rethinking the research agenda on change and response.

This essay drafts a new interdisciplinary agenda for research on population and development. Starting from Kingsley Davis's 1963 formulation of change and response, Davis's analytical categories are broadened to include inertia as well as change and to encompass both demographic and non-demographic responses at the micro, meso, and macro levels. On that basis the essay proposes what can be called a comprehensive demography, an approach drawing principally on micro-level methodologies like those employed in anthropological demography. Like anthropological demography, comprehensive demography questions the rationality of actors, emphasizes cultural infuences, and stops short of the postmodernist extremes of anthropology. But it also takes explicit account of higher-level social, economic, and political factors bearing on demographic behavior and outcomes. The conclusion raises some epistemological issues. Illustrative examples are offered throughout to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, mainly referring to sub-Saharan africa and the Caribbean and often drawn from the authors' own fieldwork.

Feet and fabrication: footbinding and early twentieth-century rural women's labor in Shaanxi.

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women's work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women's status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

"The last thing that tells our story": the Roodepoort West Cemetery, 1958-2008.

This article attempts to capture some of the complexity in the way that memory, meaning and agenda interact in the history of the cemetery of Roodepoort West. Roodepoort West was the 'old location' where Africans and others lived until 1955, after which a gradual process of removals took place until 1967, when it was finally destroyed. However, not everything was lost of the old location. The cemetery remained, after unrest caused by the proposed removal of the local cemetery during the late 1950s persuaded the authorities to leave it alone. More recently, the cemetery has played a part in land restitution, becoming both a site of tension and remembrance. This article explores the many meanings attached to the old cemetery, and funerals more broadly, over a period of time beginning from the 1950s to 2005. By looking at the history of funerals, and the cemetery, new insights and an alternative understanding of what it meant to live in an urban area in Apartheid South Africa can be gained.