How People Compare Mathijs Pelkmans; Harry Walker
2022, 2023, 20221226, Volume:
1
eBook
Open access
This book focuses on comparison in anthropology, turning an ethnographic lens onto the diversity of comparative practice. It seeks to understand how, why and with what consequences diversely situated ...groups of people – many of whom operate on radically different premises to professional anthropologists – make comparisons, above all, between themselves and real or imagined others. What motivates people to compare, what techniques or logics do they employ, and what are the most likely outcomes – both intended and unintended? How do comparative practices reflect, reinforce or refuse uneven relations of power? And finally, what can a rejuvenated comparative anthropology learn from the anthropology of comparison? The volume develops a dialogue between scholars with long- term ethnographic engagement in a variety of contexts around the world and is particularly valuable reading for those interested in anthropological methodology and theory.
Identifying organisms directly from positive blood culture bottles using matrix-assisted laser desorption-ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) has many advantages to patients, ...clinical services, and laboratories. However, few published methods have demonstrated good performance using the current BioMérieux culture bottles and MALDI-TOF system: BacT/Alert FAN plus and Vitek MS. The effect of transporting bottles on test performance has not been assessed for any direct-from-bottle MS method. In this study, 802 positive blood culture bottles were analysed including 234 requiring inter-laboratory transport, using a method involving protein extraction with formic acid and acetonitrile. Correct identification rates were high for Staphylococcus aureus (58/58 of new diagnostic samples), Enterococcus faecalis (27/27), Gram-negative bacilli (160/176, 90.1%), and coagulase-negative Staphylococcus species (108/132, 81.8%). Three false identifications were made, none with clinical significance. For Gram-positive cocci in pairs or chains, more correct identifications were made from bottles analysed immediately compared to transported bottles (67% vs 44%, p=0.016), and longer transport time was associated with slightly lower probability of correct identification (OR 0.984 per additional hour, p=0.040). Transportation was not associated with a difference for other organism types. This technique is a vastly more cost-effective alternative to molecular techniques for rapid identification of bacteraemia isolates, and performance is minimally affected by inter-laboratory transport of bottles at ambient temperature.
Building on the importance of "play" in traditional sociality, organized team sports such as soccer are instrumental in promoting a new moral and political order among Urarina people of Peruvian ...Amazonia, one grounded in notions of roles, rules, and the abstract individual. As a vehicle of nationalist sentiment, highly amenable to ritualization and bureaucratization, sport is central to the process by which the state expands its territory and influence. Like warfare, but unifying rather than fragmenting in its effects, sport harnesses the energy and vitality of youth and co-opts them for other ends.
Under a watchful eye Walker, Harry
2012., 20121020, 2012, 2012-11-19, 20130101, Volume:
9
eBook
What does it mean to be accompanied? How can autonomy and a sense of self emerge through one's involvement with others? This book examines the formation of self among the Urarina, an Amazonian people ...of lowland Peru. Based on detailed ethnography, the analysis highlights the role of intimate but asymmetrical attachments and dependencies which begin in the womb, but can extend beyond human society to include a variety of animals, plants, spirits and material objects. It thereby raises fundamental questions about what it means to be alive, to be an experiencing subject, and to be human. From the highly personalized relationships that develop between babies and their hammocks, to the demonstrations of love and respect between spouses and the power asymmetries that structure encounters between shamans and spirits, hunters and game animals, or owners and pets, what emerges is a strong sense that the lived experience of togetherness lies at the heart of the human condition. Recognizing this relational quality of existence enables us to see how acting effectively in the world may be less a matter of individual self-assertion than learning how to elicit empathetic acts of care and attentiveness by endearing oneself to others.
Borane-pyridine acts as an efficient (5 mol%) liquid catalyst, providing improved solubility for the direct amidation of a wide range of aromatic and aliphatic carboxylic acids and amines to form ...secondary and tertiary carboxamides. Tolerance of potentially incompatible halo, nitro, and alkene functionalities has been demonstrated.
How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique ...window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances. The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms.
Elevated circulating concentrations of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) have been conclusively demonstrated in epidemiological and intervention studies to be causally associated with the ...development of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Enormous advances in LDL-C reduction have been achieved through the use of statins, and in recent years, through drugs targeting proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9), a key regulator of the hepatic LDL-receptor. Existing approaches to PCSK9 targeting have used monoclonal antibodies or RNA interference. Although these approaches do not require daily dosing, as statins do, repeated subcutaneous injections are nevertheless necessary to maintain effectiveness over time. Recent experimental studies suggest that clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) gene-editing targeted at PCSK9 may represent a promising tool to achieve the elusive goal of a 'fire and forget' lifelong approach to LDL-C reduction. This paper will provide an overview of CRISPR technology, with a particular focus on recent studies with relevance to its potential use in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
This article elaborates an Amazonian conception of the common and the challenge it poses to Western thinking about individualism and equality. It is suggested that a number of distinctive features of ...Amazonian Urarina sociality may have their basis in a shared refusal of factors that give rise to relations of equivalence between people. This kind of singularism, or ‘individualism without individuals’, results from an orientation to the common as a collective resource that is antithetical to property, in which subjectivity is shaped in relation to wider ecological and affective resources that are continuously and collectively produced. This embraces not only shared economic resources, such as land or game animals, but also ways of organizing and producing affective, cognitive, and linguistic relations, ‘commonalities’ of various kinds which never reduce differences to an subject, such as the individual of liberalism or the collective of socialism.
Abstrait
Égalité sans équivalence : une anthropologie du commun
Résumé
L'article explore une conception amazonienne du commun et les difficultés qu'elle pose à la pensée occidentale concernant l'individualisme et l’égalité. L'auteur suggère que plusieurs traits distinctifs de la vie sociale des Urarinas d'Amazonie peuvent être fondés sur un refus partagé des facteurs établissant des relations d’équivalence entre les personnes. Ce type de singularisme, ou « d'individualisme sans individus » résulte d'une orientation vers le commun comme ressource collective à l'opposé de la propriété, dans laquelle la subjectivité est modelée par rapport à des ressources écologiques et affectives plus larges, produites de façon continue et collectivement. Ces dernières incluent non seulement les ressources économiques partagées, par exemple la terre et le gibier, mais aussi des manières d'organiser et de produire des liens affectifs, cognitifs et linguistiques, des « communalités » de différentes sortes qui ne réduisent jamais les différences à un sujet abstrait tel que l'individu du libéralisme ou le collectif du socialisme.
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