Assessing women's understandings of health in rural Papua New Guinea: implications for health policy and practice.

In Papua New Guinea (PNG), women's health is addressed by applying biomedical solutions which often ignore the complexity of women's histories, cultural contexts and lived experiences. The objective of this study was to examine adult and older women's perceptions of health and well-being to identify priority areas for public service interventions. Rapid ethnographic assessment was conducted in the Wosera district, a rural area of PNG from mid-2005 to early 2006, to examine the health concerns of women. Twenty-seven adult women and 10 older women participated in the study. Health was not limited to one aspect of a woman's life, such as their biology or maternal roles; it was also connected with the social, cultural and spiritual dimensions of women's daily existence. Participants also identified access to money and supportive interpersonal relationships as significant for good health. A disconnect was found to exist between women's understandings of good health and socio-political health policies in PNG, something likely to be repeated in health service delivery to different cultural groups across the Asia Pacific region. Health and development practitioners in PNG must become responsive to the complexity of women's social relationships and to issues relating to the context of women's empowerment in their programmes.

The two worlds of race revisited: a meditation on race in the age of Obama.

Nearly fifty years ago, the American Academy organized a conference and two issues of its journal "Daedalus" on the topic of "The Negro American." The project engaged top intellectuals and policy-makers around the conflicts and limitations of mid-1960s liberalism in dealing with race. Specifically, they grappled with the persistent question of how to integrate a forced-worker population that had been needed but that was socially undesirable once its original purpose no longer existed. Today, racism has been discredited as an idea and legally sanctioned segregation belongs to the past, yet the question the conference participants explored -- in essence, how to make the unwanted wanted -- still remains. Recent political developments and anticipated demographic shifts, however, have recast the terms of the debate. Gerald Early, guest editor for the present volume, uses Barack Obama's election to the presidency as a pretext for returning to the central question of "The Negro American" project and, in turn, asking how white liberalism will fare in the context of a growing minority population in the United States. Placing his observations alongside those made by John Hope Franklin in 1965, Early positions his essay, and this issue overall, as a meditation on how far we have come in America to reach "the age of Obama" and at the same time how far we have to go before we can overcome "the two worlds of race."

"The herald of prosperity": tracing the boll weevil myth in Alabama.

As scholars and singers have pointed out in monographs and folk songs, the cotton boll weevil was a devastating force on southern farming and rural life. No symbol is more indicative of this destruction than Enterprise, Alabama's boll weevil monument. This essay examines not how the cotton pest destroyed the region's staple crop, but how women and men across race and class lines understood the beetle's threat and used it to their advantage. The statue, like the countless blues and folk songs about the pest, was a cultural statement that shaped the understanding of the bug itself and its supposed transformation of southern agriculture. By examining the local conditions that gave rise to dramatic, albeit short-lived, crop diversification, and in turn the monument's erection, this essay uncovers the ways in which the boll weevil myth was as important a force on southern life as the long-snouted beetle itself.

Rendering justice in witch trials: the case of the val de Lièpvre.

The borderland of the val de Lièpvre, with lands in Alsace and in the Duchy of Lorraine, and divided by religion and language, offers a rich collection of sources for the history of witchcraft persecution. The territory sharply reveals what was undoubtedly characteristic of witchcraft trials more widely. The crime of witchcraft was considered abominable before the Christian community and God, and its prosecution justified abandoning many of the safeguards and constraints in legal procedure, whether restrictions on the use of torture, the reliance on dubious testimony or even denial of advocacy to the witches. The action of the judges was nonetheless, as they understood it, the rendering of true justice, by punishing the culprits with a harshness that would expiate their crimes before the community and preserve them from damnation in the face of God's judgment.

Terra Australis to Oceania: racial geography in the "fifth part of the world".

This paper is a synoptic history of racial geography in the 'fifth part of the world' or Oceania - an extended region embracing what are now Australia, Island Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. The period in question stretches from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, to focus on the consolidation of European racial thinking with the marriage of geography and raciology in the early 19th century. The paper investigates the naming of places by Europeans and its ultimate entanglement with their racial classifications of people. The formulation of geographical and anthropological knowledge is located at the interface of metropolitan discourses and local experience. This necessitates unpacking the relationships between, on the one hand, the deductive reasoning of metropolitan savants, and, on the other hand, the empirical logic of voyagers and settlers who had visited or lived in particular places, encountered their inhabitants, and been exposed, often unwittingly, to indigenous agency and knowledge.

Something black in the American Psyche: formal innovation and Freudian imagery in the comics of Winsor McCay and Robert Crumb.

Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland anticipates Robert Crumb's work. McCay's innocent dreamscapes seem antithetical to the sexually explicit work of anti-capitalist Crumb, but Nemo looks forward to Crumb in subject and form. Nemo's presentation of class, gender, and race, and its pre-Freudian sensibility are ironic counterpoints to Crumb's political, Freudian comix.

Doing psychology, doing inequality: rethinking the role of psychology in creating and maintaining social inequality.

The relationship between psychological disciplines and inequality has been a subject of great scholarly interest in the last several decades. Most works on the subject analyze macro features of psychological disciplines (mainly their evaluative tools, theoretical assumptions, and disciplinary power) and criticize them as biased against minorities. This paper re-examines the relationship between psychology and inequality from a micro, face-to-face standpoint. Drawing on close observations of 33 placement committees in which professionals from various psychological fields (psychology, social work, school counseling, etc.) discuss children's eligibility for special education services, it portrays the actual doing of psychology as an inconsistent and malleable endeavor. In contrast to the macro-oriented research on the relationship between psychology and inequality, it shows that in actual face-to-face interactions, professionals use different types of folk concerns that often exchange formal evaluative criteria, theoretical assumptions or professional authority in final placement decisions. By revealing the different folk considerations professionals use to sort and analyze working- versus middle-class parents, this project adds an essential layer to scholarly understanding of the relationship between psychological practice and inequality.

Prendas-Ngangas-Enquisos: turbulence and the influence of the dead in Cuban-Kongo material culture.

Cuban-Kongo praise of the dead in Havana turns insistently around complex agglomerations of materials called "prendas,""ngangas," and "enquisos." This article addresses the ontological status of "prendas-ngangas-enquisos," which practitioners of Cuban-Kongo affliction practices care for as entities that determine the very possibility of their healing and harming craft. Cuban-Kongo societies of affliction, in Havana collectively referred to as "Palo," stake their claim to influence others in and through these entities. In this essay I seek to position the influence generated in prendas-ngangas-enquisos as a problem for Euro-American materialism, to be addressed not through symbolic or representational solutions but, rather, by refocusing the problem itself via alternate distributions of its epistemological, historical, and ethnographic elements. Contextualized within ethnographic description, I first propose that prendas-ngangas-enquisos do not conform to dialectical logic, and should thus be positioned conceptually as something other than "objects" or "fetishes." From there, I consider Creole turns on the term prenda and explore scholarly accounts of 19th-century Cuban slavery and manumission, which I place alongside what is known about pawn slavery among BaKongo people prior to and during the Atlantic slave trade. Having established a basic series of conceptual and historiographic coordinates, I then suggest ethnographically how prendas-ngangas-enquisos come to command others, thereby guaranteeing Cuban-Kongo healing and harming sovereignty in Cuba today.

The mistress, the midwife, and the medical doctor: pregnancy and childbirth on the plantations of the antebellum American South, 1800-1860.

This article represents a step towards examining the relationship between three key figures in the antebellum American South: the plantation mistress, the slave-midwife, and the professional male physician. It elucidates how the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, which brought women close to death, formed the basis of a deeper, positive relationship between the black and white women of the antebellum South, and assesses the ways in which the professionalization of medicine affected this reproductive bond. Evaluating such a complicated network of relationships necessitates dissecting numerous layers of social interaction, including black and white women's shared cultural experiences and solidarity as reproductive beings; the role, power, and significance of slave-midwives and other enslaved caretakers in white plantation births; the cooperation between pregnant bondswomen and plantation mistresses; and the impact that the burgeoning profession of medicine had on the procreative union between antebellum black and white women.

Towards a holistic review of Pan-Africanism: linking the idea and the movement.

This article explores two general approaches to defining Pan-Africanism. Traditional Pan-Africanism reflects definitions of Pan-Africanism that begin with the assumption that distinctions must be made between early "ideas" of group identification with Africa versus modern organizational activities. However, holistic approaches emphasize the interconnectivity of Pan-African ideas and concrete activities. This discussion explores these approaches and their implications for contemporary analyses of Pan-Africanism. The essay concludes that the holistic line is best suited for developing a new model in Pan-Africanism.

See Josephus: viewing first-century sexual drama with Victorian eyes.

This article looks first at how the art of J.W. Waterhouse responds to the classical world: how complex the scene of reception is, triangulated between artist, the ancient past, and his audiences, and extended over time. Second, it looks at how this scene of reception engages with a specific Victorian problematic about male sexuality and self-control. This is not just a question of Waterhouse using classics as an alibi for thinking about desire, but also of the interference of different models of desire and different knowledges of the classical world in the reception of the painting's narrative semantics.

Moral transgression and illness in the Early Modern North.

This article seeks to understand how people in the early modern age interpreted the nature of illness and the role that morality played in these interpretations. From this point of view illnesses were not only psycho-physical states or subjects for medical diagnosis but they were also subjects for narratives or stories through which people tried to understand what had caused their illness, and why it was happening to them. Illnesses were understood as strictly connected with the patient's character and were regarded as possible consequences of his personality. On the other hand, the interpretations also emphasised the ambivalence of a healer. Personal experiences and an understanding of one's life situation intertwined in these stories.

Moral transgression, disease and holistic health in the Livingstonia Mission in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Malawi.

This article examines ideas of morality and health, and connections between moral transgression and disease in both Scottish missionary and Central African thought in the context of the Livingstonia Mission of the Presbyterian Free Church of Scotland in Malawi during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By concentrating on debates, conflicts and co-operation between missionaries and Africans over the key issues of beer drinking and sexual morality, this article explores the emergence of a new "moral hygiene" among African Christian communities in Northern Malawi.

"The Root is Hidden and the Material Uncertain": the challenges of prosecuting witchcraft in early modern Venice.

The rich archival records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Venice have yielded much information about early modern society and culture. The transcripts of witchcraft trials held before the Inquisition reveal the complexities of early modern conceptions of natural and supernatural. The tribunal found itself entirely unable to convict individuals charged with performing harmful magic, or maleficio, as different worldviews clashed in the courtroom. Physicians, exorcists, and inquisitors all had different approaches to distinguishing natural phenomena from supernatural, and without a consensus guilty verdicts could not be obtained.

Linking traditional knowledge and environmental practice in Ontario.

Beginning in the late 1980s with the release of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development, followed by the development of international accords such as the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, international pressure to resolve Indigenous rights issues has been steadily mounting. Successive Canadian governments have been striving increasingly to recognize and incorporate Aboriginal traditional knowledge into resource management planning. Following more than a decade of such efforts, the question of how to achieve such incorporation appropriately remains inadequately answered. This essay contributes to the resolution of this issue by first clarifying some key differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal definitions of "traditional knowledge." Then, three Ontario case studies are briefly described that highlight the most and least successful aspects of previous undertakings. Among the lessons learned are the need to value traditional knowledge on a par with Western science while recognizing the particular capabilities of each system, and the requirement that Aboriginal peoples and their knowledge participate on a mutually respectful basis.

Sorcery and publicity: the Cadière-Girard scandal of 1730-1731.

The Cadière-Girard trial of 1730-1731 is an early example of a sensational, nationally publicized French trial in which the major parties were private individuals. Cadière, a female penitent, accused Girard, her Jesuit confessor, of bewitching and raping her; Girard claimed that Cadière was guilty of slander. It was to be the last witchcraft trial in the francophone world. Another notable feature of the trial was its publicity, in which the contesting parties almost immediately became stand-ins for the Society of Jesus and for its Jansenist adversaries. This paper argues that certain anti-Jesuits, particularly Cadière's defence team and in the Parlement of Aix-en-Provence, acted to prolong the trial with the aim of creating as much bad publicity as possible for the Society of Jesus; it also shows how Jansenist publicists took advantage of the lengthy process, creating literature that "burned Girard in spirit," and with him, the Jesuits as a whole.