/////////////////Insurgent CitizenshipDisjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in BrazilJames Holston To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8533.htmlJames Holston argues that for two centuries Brazilians have practiced a type of citizenship all too common among nation-states--one that is universally inclusive in national membership and massively inegalitarian in distributing rights and in its legalization of social differences. But since the 1970s, he shows, residents of Brazil's urban peripheries have formulated a new citizenship that is destabilizing the old. Their mobilizations have developed not primarily through struggles of labor but through those of the city--particularly illegal residence, house building, and land conflict. Yet precisely as Brazilians democratized urban space and achieved political democracy, violence, injustice, and impunity increased dramatically. Based on comparative, ethnographic, and historical research, Insurgent Citizenship reveals why the insurgent and the entrenched remain dangerously conjoined as new kinds of citizens expand democracy even as new forms of violence and exclusion erode it.
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////////////////////////10 Holiday Food Switches to Cut CaloriesAnd the worst isn't over yet! I'm just about to embark on a new cycle of end-of-the-year parties. Then, of course, there are the candies and cookies lying around the office. (A clever trick, coworkers, to get that stuff out of your home.)
/////////////////////////Calorie Count PlusI am developing a Calorie Count problem, as a result of the holidays. I'm spending entirely too much time looking up the calories in the food I eat. But hey, at least I'm replacing and an unhealthy addiction with a healthy one.
///////////////////Middle Age + Holidays: A Lethal Combination?By Kathy Kastan, HuffingtonPost.comSuicide rates are alarmingly high among middle-aged Americans, and the holiday season often amplifies the problem. Read more »
//////////////////Tea Drinkers Have Stronger Bones
If you’re a tea drinker, you’re doing something that will help to keep your bones stronger as you age.
By Gale Maleskey, MS, RDRegistered Dietitian About the Author November 12, 2007
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If you’re a tea drinker, you’re doing something that will help to keep your bones stronger as you age.
A new study from Australian researchers found that women ages 70-85 who drank tea regularly had higher bone density in two sites in their hip compared to women who did not drink tea. The difference was 3% to 4.5%. Tea drinkers also lost 3% to 4.5 % less bone density over a 4-year period compared to non-drinkers.
//////////////////////The Horse, the Wheel, and LanguageHow Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern WorldDavid W. Anthony To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8488.htmlRoughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
/////////////////////////HM=A Cultural Symptom?Repressed Memory
Are some experiences so horrific that the human brain seals them away, only to recall them years later? The concept of “repressed memory,” known by the diagnostic term dissociative amnesia, has long fueled controversy in psychiatry. During the 1980s, claims of childhood sexual abuse based on recovered memories led to a spate of highly publicized court cases. A number of the supposed victims retracted their allegations in the early 1990s, admitting that they had been swayed by therapeutic techniques. Yet the scientific validity of dissociative amnesia has remained contested ground.
In a recent study, professor of psychiatry Harrison Pope, co-director of the Biological Psychiatry Lab at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, put “repressed memory” to the test of time. He reasoned that if dissociative amnesia were an innate capability of the brain—akin to depression, hallucinations, anxiety, and dementia—it would appear in written works throughout history. In collaboration with associate professor of psychiatry James Hudson, Michael Parker, a professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Michael Poliakoff, director of education programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities, and research assistant Matthew Boynes, Pope set out to find the earliest recorded example of a “repressed memory.”
The survey yielded various nineteenth-century instances: best known were A Tale of Two Cities (1859), by Charles Dickens, in which Dr. Manette forgets that he is a physician after his incarceration in the Bastille, and Captains Courageous (1896), by Rudyard Kipling, in which “Penn,” a former minister, loses his memory after his family perishes in a flood and recalls that trauma only after being involved in a collision at sea. But the survey turned up no examples from pre-modern sources.
The researchers then offered a $1,000 reward—posted in three languages on more than 30 Internet websites and discussion groups—to the first person to identify a case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800. They received more than 100 responses, but none met the “repressed memory” criteria. Although many early texts describe ordinary forgetfulness caused by natural biological processes, as well as instances of individuals forgetting happy memories and even their own identities, there were no accounts of an inability to recall a traumatic experience at one point and the subsequent recovery of that memory.
In a report of their findings published in Psychological Medicine, Pope and his colleagues concluded that the absence of dissociative amnesia in works prior to 1800 indicates that the phenomenon is not a natural neurological function, but rather a “culture-bound” syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century. They argued that dissociative amnesia falls into the diagnostic category “pseudo-neurological symptom” (or “conversion disorder”)—a condition that “lacks a recognizable medical or neurological basis.”
The authors have also refuted a number of alternative hypotheses that might explain their survey results. For instance, they argued, the fact that pre-nineteenth- century societies may have conceptualized memory differently than we do cannot account for the lack of recorded descriptions of dissociative amnesia. “Our ancestors had little understanding about delusions and hallucinations,” Pope points out. “They didn’t know about dopamine in the brain or things we now know cause paranoia or auditory hallucinations, but descriptions of hallucinations [appear] in literature for hundreds of years and from all over the world.” Similarly, “If an otherwise lucid individual spontaneously develops complete amnesia for a serious traumatic event, such as being raped or witnessing the death of relations or friends,” the researchers explained, “a description of such a case would surely be recognizable, even through a dense veil of cultural interpretation” such as spirit possession or some other supernatural event.
What, then, accounts for “repressed memory’s” appearance in the nineteenth century and its endurance today? Pope and his colleagues hope to answer these questions in the future. “Clearly the rise of Romanticism, at the end of the Enlightenment, created fertile soil for the idea that the mind could expunge a trauma from consciousness,” Pope says. He notes that other pseudo-neurological symptoms (such as the female “swoon”) emerged during this era, but faded relatively quickly. He suspects that two major factors helped solidify “repressed memory” in the twentieth-century imagination: psychoanalysis (with its theories of the unconscious) and Hollywood. “Film is a perfect medium for the idea of repressed memory,” he says. “Think of the ‘flashback,’ in which a whole childhood trauma is suddenly recalled. It’s an ideal dramatic device.”
Shortly after publication of their paper, the investigators awarded the $1,000 prize to the nominator of Nina, an opera by Dalayrac and Marsollier performed in Paris in 1786. (Forgetting that she saw her lover apparently lying dead after a duel, the heroine waits for him daily at an appointed spot. When the young man reappears, Nina first seems to recognize him, then doubts his identity, and only slowly accepts him for who he is.) Pope says he and his colleagues were a few years off their threshold of 1800, but he believes their argument holds: “The challenge falls upon anyone who believes that repressed memory is real to explain its absence for thousands of years.”
~Ashley Pettus
//////////////////////////Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization.
Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, David Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. He explains how they spread their traditions and gave rise to important advances in copper mining, warfare, and patron-client political institutions, thereby ushering in an era of vibrant social change. Anthony also describes his fascinating discovery of how the wear from bits on ancient horse teeth reveals the origins of horseback riding.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries - the source of the Indo-European languages and English - and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.
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Artificial blood vessels 'closer'
It is hoped the technology could be used to make blood vesselsScientists are a step nearer the creation of tiny artificial blood vessels after growing miniscule tubes out of stem cells in the laboratory.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology team got the cells to stretch and form tubes along a grooved template, Advanced Materials reports.
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