bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The protective role of Visudyne eyeglass® against VEGF synthesis after photodynamic therapy with verteporfin
Authors: Türkçüoğlu Peykan , İlhan Nevin , Kurt Julide , Aydemir Orhan , Çeliker Ülkü
Published: February 2009

Purpose:  We aimed to determine the extent of protection provided by Visudyne eyeglass® against vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) synthesis following photodynamic therapy (PDT).

Methods:  Three groups with 14 rabbits in each were established. These consisted of a control (dextrose infusion) group, an infusion (verteporfin infusion) group and an irradiation (verteporfin infusion + irradiation) group. One eye in each animal was closed with Visudyne eyeglass® and the other by eyelid sutures. The rabbits were exposed to daylight for 30 mins at 2 and 48 hours after the infusion was administered. Half the animals in each group were killed on day 5. The remaining animals were killed on day 10. Levels of VEGF in homogenized retina and choroids were analysed with an ELISA (enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay).

Results:  Mean VEGF levels, in pg/mg protein, on days 5 and 10 in the control + glass, control + suture, infusion + glass, infusion + suture, irradiation + glass and irradiation + suture subgroups were, respectively: 1.69 ± 0.67, 1.91 ± 0.44; 1.75 ± 0.69, 1.93 ± 0.53; 2.30 ± 0.77, 3.47 ± 2.02; 1.90 ± 1.00, 2.93 ± 0.16; 4.39 ± 2.74, 13.63 ± 5.25; 3.38 ± 1.05, 7.37 ± 2.12. On day 10, VEGF levels were significantly higher in the infusion and irradiation groups compared with the control group (p < 0.05). There were no statistically significant differences between glass and suture samples on days 5 and 10 in the infusion group, or on day 5 in the irradiation group. However, on day 10, the mean VEGF level in eyes closed with Visudyne eyeglass® in the irradiation group was significantly higher than in sutured eyes (p = 0.011).

Conclusions:  Visudyne eyeglass® offers full protection against VEGF increases caused by verteporfin infusion but is only partially protective in eyes exposed to sensitizing light.
Acute cardiac death associated with polypharmacy during use of anti‐obesity drug
Authors: Kang Tae Hoon , Zhang AiHua , Kim Hyoung Joong , Yoo Seong Ho , Sun Chung Hee , Lee Soong Deok
Published: February 2009

Many clinicians use anti‐obesity drugs before they have been proven safe. Further, polypharmacy of weight‐loss medications appears to be popular, and as a result unwanted drug interactions are occuring. We performed autopsies on three women who died after taking phendimetrazine and fluoxetine for weight loss. In all three cases, no internal or external abnormality could explain the direct cause of death – other than positive toxicological results for the weight‐loss drugs. Blood drug concentration was within the therapeutic range and blood alcohol was not detected. Although we cannot say for certain the exact mechanism of the death, we think that polypharmacy of phendimetrazine and fluoxetine may be a factor. We report these cases with a discussion of the use of anti‐obesity drugs.
Glypican‐3 and MAGE‐1 are predictors of tumor invasiveness of hepatocellular carcinoma
Authors: Eun Shin , Lee Kyoung Bun , Park Soo Young , Yun Woong Jae , Kang Tae Hoon , Kim Bo Sung , Jang Ja‐June
Published: February 2009

Background and aim: Large scale studies on protein targeting for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are limited and the clinical implications of targeted proteins have not been fully investigated. We studied the expression of three candidate antigens, glypican‐3(GPC3), human melanoma antigen‐1(MAGE‐1) and alpha‐fetoprotein (AFP) in HCC on large number samples. Methods: We performed immunohistochemistry using tissue microarray on 420 HCC samples and 120 non‐tumorous hepatic tissues. Results: GPC3 staining was observed in 250 (62.3%) of 401 HCC cases, while none of the control group had positive staining. The expression of MAGE‐1 was 9.75%, 7.1% and 18.8% with the three different antibodies. None of the control group was stained with MAGE‐1, with two antibodies. Control cases were more frequently stained than HCC with two different AFP antibodies. Microscopic vascular invasion, and T‐stage correlated with the expression of GPC3. Vascular and other organ invasion correlated with MAGE‐1 expression. GPC‐3+ HCC was associated with a short survival rate. Conclusions: GPC3 and MAGE‐1 are useful biomarkers indicating tumor aggressiveness as well as potent target proteins for HCC immunotherapy. AFP staining had a high false positivity and further evaluation is required.
Probable relationship between increased number of birefringent particles and diffuse interstitial lung diseases
Authors: Park Jae Hong , Ha Seung Yeon , Cho Hyun Yee , Chung Dong Hae , Kim Na Rae , Park Sanghui , Lee Jae‐Ik
Published: February 2009

Background and aim: Although there is increasing evidence that inhaled birefringent particles (BPs) cause pulmonary fibrotic reaction, the relationship between BPs and diffuse interstitial lung diseases (DILDs) remains unclear. Methods: We assessed 85 cases of interstitial lung diseases including 50 cases of usual interstitial pneumonia (UIP), 22 cases of nonspecific interstitial pneumonia (NSIP) and 13 cases of bronchiolitis obliterans‐organizing pneumonia (BOOP) and 55 cases of normal lung tissue from control group. BPs were measured and counted by image analyzer under polarizing microscope. Results: The average BP count in all types of interstitial lung disease was 223.60/10 high power fields (HPF), significantly higher than the average of 116.80/10HPFs found in the control group (P= 0.01). Among individual disease entities, UIP showed significantly higher BP count than control (232.80/10HPFs, P= 0.01). Although statistically insignificant, NSIP and BOOP also revealed higher BP counts than the control (192.09/10HPFs and 241.54/10HPFs, respectively). Conclusions: Increased BPs in the lung might be related to the fibrogenic process of interstitial lung diseases.
Promoting Primitivism: Conservationist Depictions of Aboriginal Australians1
Authors: Sackett Lee
Published: February 2009

Aborigines, like native Americans and others, face the unending task of resisting attempts, on the one hand to cut them off from their ‘heritage’, and on the other to bury them within it as ‘a thing of the past’ (Beckett 1988: 212).
Anderson and Authoritarianism
Authors: Thiele Steven
Published: February 2009

This paper examines the work of John Anderson with particular reference to the issue of authority, or, more precisely, authoritarianism. It is suggested that opposition to authoritarianism, along with an attempt to spell out a non‐authoritarian form of social enquiry, is Anderson's central concern. In the light of this, a number of reasons are put forward as to why his work has not been taken up by many sociologists and anthropologists. Finally, a suggestion is made as to how his thinking might be challenged in a way sufficient to stimulate its development. This is done by reference to a distinction between guilt, an emotion and set of practices powerful where appeal to authority is important, and shame, which does not require such an appeal.
Ubiquitous Ubiety of Dubious Uniformity
Authors: Keen Ian
Published: February 2009

Tony Swain. A Place for Strangers. Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being.
The Order of Men: the Nation and the Metropolitan Imaginary at an Indian Public School
Authors: Srivastava Sanjay
Published: February 2009

This article is concerned with exploring discursive constructions of Indian post‐coloniality and modernity. The analysis focuses upon a fully residential boys school in North India, the Doon School, which has played a historically significant role in the production of a discourse on nationhood and citizenship. Elsewhere, I have argued that the School defines its citizenship project in terms of three main ‘imaginaries’: secularism, rationality, and ‘metropolitanism’. This paper explores the construction of a narrative of the post‐colonial nation‐state at the School through ‘metropolitanism’.
Conflict Amongst the Tibetans and Indians of North India: Communal Violence and Welfare Dollars
Authors: Penny‐Dimri Sandra
Published: February 2009

Large numbers of Tibetan refugees have settled in India since the Communist Chinese occupation of Tibet in the late 1950s. As the favoured recipients of substantial financial assistance from the West they are today the focus of a good deal of envy from their less fortunate Indian neighbours. In this paper, I consider various forms of violent social conflict that have occurred between the Tibetans and Indians in two aras of Himachel Pradesh in North India. By contrasting the differing conditions prevailing in these two communities, I seek to isolate those factors most relevant in understanding the high incidence of conflict in one, but not in the other.
The Genealogy of the Gift in Antiquity
Authors: Dean Mitchell
Published: February 2009

Book reviewed in this article:

Paul Veyne. Bread and Circuses. Historical Sociology and Political Pluralism.

Peter Brown. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity. Towards a Christian Empire.
Nationalism and Belonging in India, Pakistan and South Central Asia: Some Comparative Observations
Authors: Bedford Ian
Published: February 2009

The criteria invoked in the definition of national identity are commonly derived from contexts other than those of the nation‐state itself—most notably those of territoriality, language/culture, kinship/descent and religion. It therefore follows that in seeking to understand the kind of identity or belongingness invoked in a particular instance of national ideology it is necessary to explore not only the kind of nation‐state envisaged, but also those non‐national forms of belonging or community from which the national ideology may itself be historically derived. In this paper I seek to develop this argument by comparing some of the principal forms of nationalism found in India, Pakistan and Central Asia. I pay particular attention to the importance of the concept qawm, which in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, is used to refer to a wide variety of groups to which people owe allegiance. Such usages alert us to the important fact that the nation, as ‘imagined community’, may have its origins as a political movement among sentiments and allegiances which draw on pre‐modern social arrangements and are in tension with ‘nationalist’ exclusivism. Even when the nation (as nation‐state) has been secured, so‐called ‘nationalist’ revivalism, while taking the nation for granted, may in fact appeal to sentiments of a different kind.
Is Rukun Dead? Ethnographic Interpretations of Social Change and Javanese Culture
Authors: Hawkins Mary
Published: February 2009

Within the ethnography of Indonesia in general and Java in particular, the Javanese notion of rukun, the appearance of harmony and helpfulness, has frequently been interpreted as referring not only to social harmony, but also to economic egalitarianism. Hence ‘traditional’ Javanese economic practices such as open harvests, the distribution of harvest shares and the use of the finger‐knife in rice harvesting have been seen as explicable by reference to rukun. Changes in harvesting practices with the introduction of ‘modern’ techniques, such as the use of contract labourers, have been depicted as signalling the death of rukun, both as an economic practice and as a cultural value. This article argues that such a view of social change in Java is theoretically and empirically flawed. Rukun is not a practice but rather a central ideological concept through which Javanese contextualise and apprehend their lives, their aspirations, their motivations and their social relations. In this sense, the ‘traditional’ notion of rukun is equally applicable to contemporary Java, and contemporary Javanese are just as likely to interpret the ‘modern’ world in terms of rukun.
A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Authors: McEachern Charmaine
Published: February 2009

Anthropology and cultural studies share a concern with ethnographic method. Cultural studies increasingly uses ethnography in its analyses of popular culture as it seeks to balance earlier preoccupations with text. Where cultural studies diverges from anthropology is in its encompassment within an oppositional paradigm which embeds a political agenda deep in its ethnographic work. This paper uses the area of media to explore the ways in which ethnography has been adopted and developed in cultural studies. Ethnographic focus has shifted interest in media from the text to the reception of media products. At the same time, the oppositional legacy from cultural studies' earliest days has tended to produce rather romanticised findings of a subaltern audience using media products to resist dominant cultural and political structures. It is suggested that anthropology should pay attention to cultural studies use of ethnographic method, first taking seriously the ground of popular culture as a challenge for anthropologists' more extended use of ethnography. But second, we should pay attention to the problem silences in cultural studies' ethnographies—silences like racism in audiences—since these may well have at least part of their basis in the method itself.
Le Tour du Monde: Towards an Anthropology of the Global Mega‐event
Authors: Palmer Catherine
Published: February 2009

This paper explores some of the ethnographic possibilities offered by the engagement of anthropologists in significant realms of global popular culture. It takes as its point of departure the increasing presence of mega‐events on the landscape of contemporary social life. Specifically, the paper argues that mega‐events, here exemplified by the Tour de France, offer privileged points of entry into the ways local populations are drawn into the production of global culture. By detailing several of the ethnographic properties of the Tour de France, this paper highlights the special contribution anthropology can bring to analysing the more spectacular dimensions of postmodern popular culture.
History and ‘Mentawai’: Colonialism, Scholarship and Identity in the Rereiket, West Indonesia
Authors: Reeves Glenn
Published: February 2009

This paper takes a critical look at the discursive construction of the identity of ‘the Mentaiwaians’ who are purported to inhabit the Mentawai islands in Western Indonesia. Out of a range of possible indigenous representations of identity ‘Mentawaian’ is the one that travellers and scholars universally use. I trace the formation of this representation in the very early literature on the islands authored by traders, travellers, scholars and missionaries. I then go on to examine the (hegemonic) effects of this on the way in which anthropologists have subsequently come to construct discursively the ‘culture’ of the ‘Mentawaians’. As an alternative, I propose that anthropological scholarship needs to take greater heed of the ways in which the local inhabitants construct their own identities. I briefly illustrate this through the example of my own work which describes a shifting and contextual construction of local identity in a particular locale on Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai islands.
‘Being Honest to my Science’: Reo Fortune and J.H.P. Murray, 1927‐301
Authors: Gray Geoffrey
Published: February 2009

Reo Fortune worked on Tewara Island in the D'Entrecasteaux group in the Australian Territory of Papua from November 1927 to May 1928. His relations with the Lieutenant‐Governor J.H.P. Murray and the government anthropologist F.E. Williams were problematic. In this paper I argue that Fortune's actions, along with increasing tension between Murray and Radcliffe‐Brown, were sufficient for a change in Murray's attitude towards continued independent anthropological research in Papua. After 1930, despite his early support for colonial officers receiving training in anthropology, Murray sent no cadets or officers for training in the university. With the exceptions of Geza Roheim and Paul Wirz, both in 1930, Williams conducted all anthropological research in Papua until the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941.
Anatomy of a Blockade. Towards an Ethnography of Environmental Dispute (Part 2), Rural New South Wales 1996
Authors: Peace Ade
Published: February 2009

In an earlier contribution to TAJA (Peace 1996), I aimed to initiate an anthropological approach to environmentalism in Australia. I argued that the unpacking of environmental disputes was an appropriate starting point. In this paper, I develop this further by detailing the politics of a forest blockade in southern NSW in 1996. The blockade has long been an important element in environmental conflicts for it can prove an effective political manoeuvre, both symbolically and strategically. This alone makes it a worthwhile subject for ethnographic exploration. However, in this extended case study I detail how local residents, many of whom were urban refugees, developed a sense of community, an awareness of the forest's richness, and a distinctive sense of the relation between community and forest, during the course of mounting the blockade. These elements of their political discourse served them well as they negotiated with the State Government to halt logging in the old growth forest and thus preserve the area from further exploitation.
Rimbunan Hijau versus the World Bank and Australian Miners: Print Media Representations of Forestry Policy Conflict in Papua New Guinea
Authors: Wood Mike
Published: February 2009

This article reviews some recent print media representations of Papua New Guinea's changing sense of its regional place by an analysis of debates over forestry policy. While mining and forestry both destabilise Papua New Guinea's internal structures, forestry also uniquely destabilises its sense of its wider regional affiliation. Malaysian capital dominates Papua New Guinea's forestry sector and this sector is closely associated with corruption, threats to national sovereignty and ecological destruction. Attempts to define a new regional position for Papua New Guinea are linked with Asia. Previously hegemonic Australian interests, and others, challenge these attempts in ways that seemingly draw an often sharply nationalistic distinction between the Malaysian loggers and Papua New Guinea's citizens. Forest policy concerns become key signifiers in arguments about Papua New Guinea's changing sense of national identity and appropriate regional position.
Teaching Elsewhere: Anthropological Pedagogy, Racism and Indifference in a Hong Kong Classroom
Authors: Lilley Rozanna
Published: February 2009

This essay is concerned with the political, historical and cultural contexts of teaching and learning in Hong Kong, focusing on my recent experiences of tertiary teaching there. Although an emphasis on rote learning driven by an exam oriented educational trajectory is now widely criticised, strong institutional and social forces still operate to produce a student body highly resistant to radicalising discourses. I argue that cultural indifference, chauvinism and racism pervade the classroom, posing particular challenges for anthropological pedagogy.
Incised Bamboo from New Caledonia: A Visual Analysis
Authors: Burns Margaret E.
Published: February 2009

The intricate artwork that adorns bamboo artefacts from New Caledonia is made up of a restricted range of basic elements. By combining and recombining these elementary shapes—chevrons, triangles, pentagons—the artists have produced narratives of a potentially high documentary quality. Before these narratives can be incorporated into the history of the country, however, it is necessary that the polysemic richness of the visual motifs and their transfigurative power be understood. This article is a small step in that direction.
Ethnography, Advocacy and Feminism: A Volatile Mix. A View from a Reading of Diane Bell's Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin
Authors: Macdonald Gaynor
Published: February 2009

Ethnography may lie at the heart of anthropological methodology but its claims are contested. Feminist anthropologists in particular have debated the challenges a critical academic discipline poses for a consciously politicised positioning of the ethnographer, examining the constraints this might impose on the ethnographic project. Such dilemmas are compounded in the context of advocacy work. This critique of a feminist ethnography (Diane Bell's Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin), which emerged from advocacy work in a litigious Australian context, suggests that the truth demands of advocacy work sit uneasily with both the partiality of critical ethnography and the politics of the feminist project.
Some Aspects of Continuity and Change Among Anthropologists in Australia or‘He‐Who‐Eats‐From‐One‐Dish‐With‐Us‐With‐One‐Spoon’
Authors: Beckett Jeremy
Published: February 2009

Since the future of anthropology in Australia is clouded, the address takes a look at where it has been coming from. Rather than a distinctive regional school, the discipline in Australia has been part of anthropology in the UK and the USA. In common with anthropology elsewhere, it lacks a distinctive theoretical stance, but draws on the theory current in the other social sciences. Recognising that what makes anthropology ‘special’ is the field work experience, the address reflects on the history and nature of this practice.
Mines and Monsters: A Dialogue on Development in Western Province, Papua New Guinea
Authors: Dundon Alison
Published: February 2009

This article analyses an internal debate between Gogodala villagers, Western Province, Papua New Guinea, in which they explore the concept of development through a dialogue that revolves around ela gi or ‘way of life’. The analysis focuses on two developmental projects: the Ok Tedi gold and copper mine, which affects eight Gogodala villages on the lower Fly River, and a test oil drill carried out among northern Gogodala villages in 1995. I propose that it is through ela gi, a lifestyle that encompasses an evangelical Christianity as well as the actions of the first ancestors and is based on a bodily experience of the environment, that community development is envisaged and debated. Whilst the oil drill in the north is discussed in terms of approval, villagers on the Fly River to the south are increasingly concerned about changes to their lifestyle and landscape. They explore this ambivalence through a discussion of the movements and moods of ancestrally‐derived ‘monsters’ or ugu lopala, creatures who patrol the waterways of both north and south villages. At the same time, Gogodala from both communities are articulating what the transition from ‘living on sago’ to a lifestyle based on money might mean. This dialogue foregrounds an ongoing debate about the roles that the environment, village practices, the ancestral past and Christianity play in the constitution of the Gogodala way of life, and how these factors may initiate a certain kind of development.
Beyond Malinowski and AfterWriting Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography
Authors: Marcus George E.
Published: February 2009

Following out certain implications of the 1980sWriting Culturecritique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.
Moving Histories: An Analysis of the Dynamics of Place in North Ambrym, Vanuatu
Authors: Patterson Mary
Published: February 2009

Recent writing on the ethnogeography of Vanuatu has identified mobility and primordial connection as two counterpoised aspects of connection to place that have a long history in the archipelago. These themes are taken up in this paper in the specific case of north Ambrym, an island community in north‐central Vanuatu in which the accidental geography of active volcanoes has fostered an equally active interest in making connections outside the island. In the post‐contact period, Ambrymese were more mobile than many of their neighbours, as they recruited vigorously in a labour trade taking them to distant destinations and facilitating a fragmentation of the local population, already decimated by introduced disease. In addition, conversion of a large proportion of the population to Christianity brought local movement. The named domains, with their primordial connections to ancient sites replete with cosmo‐mythic significance, were reconstituted as villages of one denomination or another, containing members of many different origin sites. Cash‐cropping became characteristic of coastal, Christian settlements whose residents saw themselves as opposed to their ‘heathen’ neighbours. For the bush‐folk, kastom was both symbolic of their identification with the past and their justification for exclusive access to its popular manifestations in the artefact trade, in the present. In the pre‐Independence 1970s, local politics and pressure on productive resources including kastom, forced a radical re‐emphasis on primordial connection at the expense of the more ‘rhizomatic’ attachments inside and outside domains, the boundaries of districts and even the island itself that had been, until then, more characteristic of Ambrymese place‐making.
Ethnography and Co‐Existence
Authors: Eipper Chris
Published: February 2009

Michael Jackson. Minima Ethnographica: Intersubjectivity and the Anthropological Project.
United and Divided: Christianity, Tradition and Identity in Two South Coast Papua New Guinea Villages
Authors: Goddard Michael , Heekeren Deborah Van
Published: February 2009

The Motu and the Hula, two south coast Papua New Guinea societies, are linguistically related, have similar social organisation and were economically linked before European colonisation. They were both introduced to Christianity by the London Missionary Society in the late 19th century, and each appeared to incorporate the new religion into their social life and thought quickly and unproblematically. More than a century later, however, generalities about the similar adoption of Christianity by the Motu and the Hula are no longer possible. Nor are generalities about the engagement with Christianity within one or the other group, as individual Motu and Hula villages have unique histories. In this regard, while Christianity has now arguably become part of putative tradition among the Motu, some Hula are experiencing conflict between Christianity and their sense of tradition. In particular, while in the Motu village of Pari Christian virtues are appealed to as part of Pari's conception of itself as a ‘traditional’ Motu village, the situation in the Hula village of Irupara is more or less the contrary. Many people in Irupara are now lamenting ‘tradition’ as something lost, a forgotten essence destroyed or replaced by Christianity. Based on fieldwork in both villages, this paper discusses some differences in their engagement with Christianity and compares contemporary perceptions of religion, tradition and identity in both societies, informing a commentary on notions of tradition and anthropological representations of the Melanesian experience of Christianity.
Beyond Anthropology, Towards Actuality1
Authors: Hamilton Annette
Published: February 2009

Anthropology in Australia is at a critical juncture. This paper discusses the way in which the discipline has been challenged at the institutional level, in part due to pressures arising from economic rationalisation within universities. Anthropology, however, must take some responsibility for its condition. Psychology has established itself as the primary ‘human’ discipline to provide qualifications appropriate for professional employment. At a more scholarly level, anthropology's traditional zones of concern have been taken over by others, including history and cultural studies. Can we, and should we, demystify anthropology and its practices? Can we reposition anthropology with a broader vision of the human experience, and what will happen if we cannot?
From Victim to Victimhood: Truth Commissions and Trials as Rituals of Political Transition and Individual Healing
Authors: Humphrey Michael
Published: February 2009

The victim has been put at the centre of states' post‐atrocity strategies to reform governance, rehabilitate state authority and promote reconciliation. This paper explores the role of the victim in the truth commissions and trials aimed at reconciliation and justice and their experiences of the outcomes. The successor state's focus on recovering victims after mass atrocity ritually inverts the former regime's project of producing them. In both truth commissions and trials the state seeks to manipulate the ‘spectacle’ of the victim's pain and suffering to publicly project the power of the state for different ends. Whereas the repressive state seeks to deepen the effects of violence as a strategy of rule, the successor state seeks to reverse the social and political effects of violence. These strategies of transitional justice have sought to reverse the effects of exclusion, to reverse the direction of state power from producing victims towards redeeming victims, from injuring to healing.

Because of the problems of mass criminality and widespread impunity, truth commissions have become widely adopted in preference to trials as a bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder. They set about producing a ‘democratising truth’ through a process of public inquiry located outside the state in the people. On the whole, the process, the public testimony and the witnessing has been better received than the product, the reports and the reparations. By contrast, trials seek to produce a societal consensus based on the recovery of the law. But in both cases the victim is redeemed through the individualising discourse of law or the polarising logic of trials which establishes the guilty and innocent. The truth of atrocity is found in affirming gross human rights abuses in victims, in transacted violence rather than the deeper structures of violence. Thus, victimhood is built on a universalising human rights discourse which overly individualises the origins of atrocity.
The Sexual Life of Cyber‐Savants
Authors: Marshall Jonathan
Published: February 2009

Netsex, or cybersex as it is sometimes known, is shown to be both a way of manifesting and dealing with some of the problems facing people in some online groups. The ethnographic data comes from the mailing list ‘Cybermind’, where netsex seems to have been an important, but relatively hidden, part of list activity. Some effects of the structure of mailing lists and communication programs are described. A description of netsex is given and analysed, various list‐based discussions about the subject are described, and it is shown how netsex operated amongst some group members. It is argued that netsex is one of a number of ways which are used to frame and explore the occurrence of diverging meanings and vague boundaries, the paradoxical conventions of authenticity (depending on such things as strong emotion, body feelings, typing errors and gender), and the oscillating and uncertain relationship between online and offline life.
What to Make of Tiwi History?
Authors: Robinson Gary
Published: February 2009

John Morris. The Tiwi: From Isolation To Cultural Change. A History of Encounters Between an Island People and Outside Forces.
Historians and the Humanitarian Critique of Australia's Colonisation
Authors: Rowse Tim
Published: February 2009

B. Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds). Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience.
Snuggles, Cuddles and Sexuality: An(other) Anthropological Interpretation of May Gibbs's Snugglepot and Cuddlepie1
Authors: Eipper Chris
Published: February 2009

This paper offers an interpretation of May Gibbs's classic illustrated children's story, The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie. Its inspiration was Annette Hamilton's 1975 anthropological analysis, ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie: happy families in Australian society’. Rather than effacing that account, my reinterpretation draws on and augments it, even as it turns it ‘inside out’. The paper argues that stories acquire mythic status by magnetising interpretation. In suggesting that questions of subjectivity, identity and sublimated obsession are central concerns of May Gibbs's story, it directs our attention to the authoring of culture, its creation, transmission and transformation. The ‘Mother of the Gumnuts’ emerges from her recurring depictions of kinship and friendship, marriage and adoption, twinship and mirroring, androgyny, ambiguity and ambivalence, as queerly contemporary. If the approach advocated here is correct, such a revelation (and the sense we make of its significance) will not only complicate, but also enhance, Snugglepot and Cuddlepie's enduring appeal and emblematic status as a national icon.
Traders, Kinsmen and Trading Counterparts: The Rise of Local Politicians in North‐western Thailand1
Authors: Pawakapan Niti
Published: February 2009

This paper focuses on local traders and their political activities and networks in north‐western Thailand. Most town residents are engaged in trade, full‐time and part‐time. A few well‐off traders have become involved in local politics. However, getting political support, especially the votes, is no easy task. The paper attempts to demonstrate that local traders acquire support through the co‐operation of their bilateral kinsmen, trading counterparts, peers and neighbours. They form a complex network that overlaps with temple organisations and business relationships. As a result, such networks often successfully draw in political support from many townspeople, ranging from regular customers to temple‐goers and elderly religious devotees.
Memes and Metaculture: The Politics of Discourse Circulation in Fiji
Authors: Tomlinson Matt
Published: February 2009

To address the question of what makes cultural products circulate successfully or unsuccessfully, I use the analytical tools supplied by two emerging disciplines, memetics and the study of metaculture. The case that I examine is the widespread circulation of the phrase ‘failed businessman’ to describe the leader of Fiji's coup d'état in 2000. In analysing the ways that the phrase circulated globally in international news accounts (and the pages of this journal as well), but did not circulate well within Fiji itself, I argue that the concept of ‘metaculture’ gives us more sophisticated analytical tools and a fuller, richer sense of the dynamics of cultural circulation than memetics does.
Bazar, Big Kites and Other Boys' Things: Distinctions of Gender and Tradition in Balinese Youth Culture
Authors: Noszlopy Laura
Published: February 2009

Balinese society is undergoing rapid change, but remains discursively situated in a ‘timeless’ ethos of cultural tradition. This tension can be observed in relation to the cultural activities of the island's young people, particularly the young men. The staging of bazar (neighbourhood fundraising parties), the making of ogoh‐ogoh (giant papier‐mâché effigies to mark Nyepi, the Balinese New Year) and the competitive flying of oversize kites are–despite their sometimes contentious reception from older generations—popularly dubbed as ‘traditional’ expressions of Balinese youth culture. This recourse to tradition must be viewed in relation to two pervasive discourses: that of adat (customary law) and ajeg (a new protectionist ethos in the discourse on Balinese cultural identity). This paper argues that in contemporary urban Bali, male youth culture finds its most visible expressions in relation to the abiding standards of established public ritual and the equally abiding gender divisions that serve to guarantee the reproduction of ‘traditional’ social life. Rather than fighting aggressively against the grown‐up norm, these expressions replicate the public culture of the adult world—while drawing on global and national youth styles—and strive towards the expression of a specifically ‘Balinese’ youth culture.
An Indigenous Philosophical Ecology: Situating the Human
Authors: Rose Deborah
Published: February 2009

Can Indigenous ecological knowledge contribute to major debates in Western science and philosophy? I argue that it offers a ‘philosophical ecology’ that works synergistically with Western eco‐philosophy and some streams of ecological science. This paper takes up the challenge offered by Val Plumwood: that anthropology can contribute to the work of re‐situating the human. It examines an ecological philosophy of mutual benefits, and shows patterns, and a broader meta‐pattern, in which life is both for itself and for others, and in which connectivity and stability are achieved through densely recursive benefits. I identify these and other contexts as areas for further dialogue.
Managing the Myth of Ecotourism: A Queensland Case Study
Authors: Peace Adrian
Published: February 2009

Although social anthropologists are taking an increased interest in tourism in Australia, not much attention has been paid thus far to the sites from which visitors take off into the bush, wilderness or nature. Tourist resorts and lodges are not simply the locations in which basic needs are met before more energetic activities begin. Especially in ecotourist settings, important ideological claims are made about their built environments as well as the everyday practices and localised activities which are ongoing in these discursive sites. This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of one such ecotourist resort. It aims to detail the myths which are manufactured about its relation to the island environment in which it is situated, and to the world beyond.
Debating Biodiversity: Threatened Species Conservation and Scientific Values
Authors: Toussaint Yann
Published: February 2009

This paper explores some aspects of the cultural logic of conservation biology and threatened species `conservation recovery projects from the perspectives of environmental anthropology and science studies. Responses of the scientific community to recent ‘re‐discoveries' of species believed to have become extinct are considered within current decision making models that emphasise landscape scale restoration over single species recovery projects. In particular, this paper considers responses to the proposition that dedicating resources towards recovery projects for critically endangered species is inconsistent with a rational approach to biodiversity conservation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate that debates over the value of threatened species recovery projects cause many scientists to reflect on the ethical responsibilities and emotional attachments that led them to act as advocates for threatened species.
‘Inscribing’ Freud: A Critical Review of Celia Brickman's Aboriginal Populations in the Mind
Authors: Eickelkamp Ute
Published: February 2009

Working through the particular book under review, this essay seeks to demonstrate how certain entrenched positions in postcolonial feminist writings on psychoanalysis are unproductive. Instead of advancing knowledge and understanding of the human psyche, of society or of therapeutic technique, ideas in the human sciences and psychoanalysis are shown to be appropriated and distorted in order to sustain an academic self‐referential circuitry. The central argument of Brickman's book is that current psychoanalytic practice is inherently racist because Freud's metapsychology was informed by evolutionist ideas. The present discussion attempts to uncover the techniques of bias with which the author tries to substantiate her claim.
No Apology Necessary: Sahlins' Dialectic History of the Fijian Wars
Authors: James Kerry
Published: February 2009

Book reviewed in this article:

Marshall Sahlins. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa
Closing Ranks: Fundamentals in History, Politics and Anthropology
Authors: Hastrup Kirsten
Published: February 2009

In this presentation, I discuss fundamentalism from a processual perspective, seeking to tease out some general qualities of the processes involved in a return to fundamentals amidst social change. I start with an analysis of the historical dynamics of Icelandic society in the period 1400–1800, showing how the increasing insistence on old patterns and cultural fundamentals contributed to the gradual destruction of a one time flourishing medieval society. This devolution, I suggest, is closely correlated with a process of amplification (Sahlins) of a particular set of values, leading to a loss of flexibility in the response to environmental and other changes. Next follows a discussion of present day concerns with nationalism and other interests in bounding oneself off from the surrounding world, and demanding recognition in return. One of the processes discussed is a process of transvaluation (Tambiah), assimilating particulars to a larger and less context‐bound scheme and thereby gradually deepening the cleavage between selves and others, sometimes to the point of epistemological closure (Ignatieff). Finally, one of the anthropological fundamentals, holism, is discussed with a view to reassessing its potential for present‐day anthropology. It is argued that through the process of knowing implied in fieldwork, anthropologists arrive at a dual understanding of perceived wholes and creative agents. A new sense of holism may still grant both consistency and uniqueness to the anthropological discipline.
The Walls Came Tumbling Up: The Production of Culture, Class and Native American Societies
Authors: Sider Gerald
Published: February 2009

In this paper, two historical moments in the continual formation of Native American societies are examined: the creation of distinct and bounded ‘Indian’ societies in the south‐eastern colonial United States, and the recent internal differentiation of the Lumbee Indian peoples in North Carolina. Four issues are at stake: the production of difference and inequality within and between Native American societies; the formation and transformation of ‘culture’ in this context; a re‐examination of the concept of class; and the simultaneous production of culture and class among indigenous peoples and perhaps more generally. This leads to a suggestion concerning the problem of hegemony in struggles over inequality.
The ‘Spirit’ of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law
Authors: Langton Marcia , Mazel Odette , Palmer Lisa
Published: February 2009

Aboriginal economic relations have been misconstrued as a type of primitive exchange in at least one native title case discussed in this paper. The pursuit by Aboriginal native title claimants of recognition at law of customary economic rights as inherent in, or an adjunct of, native title rights failed in Yarmirr and Others v. Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370 (the ‘Croker Island case’) for several reasons. The applicant's native title was found to be non‐exclusive of other interests, and a right to trade in resources of the sea was rejected. This case was argued in part by relying on historical material regarding Macassan trading arrangements. The profound alterity of Aboriginal relationships among persons and things, as the Croker Island evidence of property and trade relations demonstrates, have been re‐constituted in legal discourse as an absence of economic relations. In this paper, we argue that there is no sound basis for the distinction made between commercial and non‐commercial native title rights, whether in the Native Title Act 1993 (Commonwealth of Australia), or in recent judicial reasoning. We contend that native title rights and interests constitute a sui generis species of property relations that enable economic rights as conceived in Aboriginal tradition and custom to circulate in the modern market. Aboriginal customary economic relations of and between Aboriginal groupings are markedly distinct from, yet not incommensurable with, the normative conception of economic relations in the Australian market. We argue that a reformulation of the current Australian legal ideas about economic life is necessary for the recognition of Aboriginal economic institutions in native title claims and other economic arenas.
The Anthropology of Personal Identity: Intellectual Property Rights Issues in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Australia
Authors: Burton John
Published: February 2009

This paper discusses large‐scale genealogical work at three projects in Papua New Guinea, West Papua and Australia and considers three questions: in what respects is genealogy intellectual property (IP) and, if so, who owns it; what were the regimes of permissions that permitted the collection of genealogical knowledge in each of the three cases; and what duty of care do collectors/curators of genealogical knowledge have in respect of preservation and safeguarding against improper use? It is argued that a new form of ‘emergent’ knowledge arises in which intellectual property rights (IPR) are unclear. What is more certain is that anthropologists owe a ‘cultural heritage duty of care’ towards genealogical information. The key criterion is that anthropologists must be in a position, and allowed by those who employ them, to guarantee ‘unbroken oversight’ of genealogical materials regardless of what media they are on or how they are stored.
Transnationalism and Agency in East Malaysia: Filipina Migrants in the Nightlife Industries
Authors: Hilsdon Anne‐Marie
Published: February 2009

East Malaysia's vibrant nightlife is a lucrative industry employing many Filipina migrants. The paper addresses the impact on Filipinas of discursive regimes of work, the state and family. These are derived from national discourses of ethnicity, class and nation intertwined with dominant discourses of womanhood in both Malaysia and the Philippines. The paper argues that in transnational space disciplinary regimes are heavily constraining, but resistance and negotiation are possible. The paper follows a feminist poststructuralist approach, which finds that disciplinary forces, rather than being coercive, are subtly inculcated in the migrant subject. Embodiment is never absolute and everyday actions of women initiate instability in the category ‘Woman’. This offers the opportunity for agency. Ethnographic methods are used to explore the tensions and constraints of the Filipinas' everyday experience of migration. In the setting of a largely non‐Muslim East Malaysia, ethnic identity seems differently constructed than in a predominantly Muslim Peninsula Malaysia. Through friendship and marriage with Malaysians, and integration into local communities, Filipinas are able to resist and negotiate their migrant status. The actions of Filipinas and their local Malaysian partners contest conservative notions of ethnicity, gender, class and nation in both the Philippines and Malaysia. This offers a potential for agency for Filipinas, the possibility for which could also extend to the largely non‐Muslim local Malaysians with whom they share their lives.