The Medical Tourist and a Political Economy of Care

Medical tourism has gained prominence in academic, policy and business arenas in describing the growth in the number of people travelling outside of their home country to receive planned medical treatment, with the emphasis on the combination of addressing pressing health concerns with a leisure trip. This conceptual essay offers insights into how patients are being reconceptualised in a neoliberal setting as medical tourists. In so doing it offers two key contributions. First it offers a deeper theorisation of trends in international healthcare through a political economy of care framework. This framework is not only focused on human interaction and experience but also on the political, economic and social space in which human life is played out. Second, it offers new insights into the exploration of human relationships within a market economy so that the medical tourist is seen with new eyes as a relational being.     

State of Change: Concept Metaphor of Pauline Principalities and Powers for a Political Theology of Peacebuilding

ABSTRACT

This essay responds to the need for a constructive account of the state that does not over-determine religious community-state relationships in peacebuilding scholarship and practice because experience and historically embodied stances towards the state defy affirmations about the state that produce a static formula. It offers a concept metaphor rooted in the three-fold eschatological reality of the state at home in a world of pluralism that emerges from reflections on fieldwork in Colombia. The metaphor stresses the need to break the state’s claim to ultimacy as the initial movement of engagement that allows for redemptive transformation. The notion of the state as a dynamic process is consistent with the stance Colombian communities have embodied in an ever-changing environment of conflict and peace.     

军事革命与欧洲在全球范围的崛起

由于异常激烈的生存竞争和有利于革新的思想文化背景,当世界其它地区军事上还在缓慢发展时,欧洲在14—17世纪发生了一系列军事革命,其军队在陆地和海上的作战能力得到了稳步提高。这使欧洲人在与世界其它地区的对抗中逐渐取得了越来越明显的军事优势。尽管欧洲的崛起是由政治、经济、军事、文化及社会等各个领域的许多复杂因素相互作用共同促成的,但在多数情况下军事优势是其征服过程中必不可少的条件。     

日本企业集团形成的经济前提

中共十五届四中全会指出：“积极探索公有制的多种有效实现形式,大力发展股份制和混合所有制经济,重要企业由国家控股。继续对国有企业实施战略性改组,充分发挥市场机制作用,着力培育大型企业和企业集团。”市场经济的发展和改革的深化,要求我们加强企业集团学     

Remedial agents: missionary physicians and the depopulation of Hawai'i

This article examines the activities and perspectives of nineteenth-century American missionary physicians in the Hawaiian Islands. The physicians' attitudes toward Hawaiian morbidity and depopulation are viewed in relation to the greater missionary community's role in the political transformation of the island nation. The article argues that missionary physicians monitored and reported on Native Hawaiian depopulation (a result of introduced western diseases) while simultaneously advertising the islands' benefits to American consumptives, imperialists, and others. Mission doctors also failed to respond effectively to the greatest epidemiological crisis Hawai'i had ever faced: a venereal scourge with a resulting blight of Native Hawaiian infertility. As a result of these and other factors, American hegemony in Hawai'i by midcentury was a foregone conclusion.     

Metaphor and the Anthropocene: Presenting Humans as a Geological Force

Intellectually as well as materially, the Anthropocene is a deeply cultural phenomenon. This includes its communicative form, which is a contested trope‐rich narrative, even within the sciences. In this essay I focus on the role of metaphor in Anthropocene thought and in particular, on the provocative, ambiguous, and potentially far‐reaching idea of humans as a geological force. By considering the different interpretations and meaning this metaphor encourages – including differences in what is meant by geological and force, both within and beyond stratigraphy and Earth System Science – we gain a stronger sense of the deeply allegorical and theological character of the Anthropocene story and the way it promises to reposition humans in the world.     

Jules Verne's Metaphor of the Iron Cage

Max Weber's concept of the iron cage has become a byword in the scholarly world since the publication in 1930 of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. What is less well-known is that Jules Verne had earlier used the iron cage metaphor in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869) to reveal the paradoxes of modernity. Roland Barthes criticized Verne's vision of modernity as bourgeois and positivistic, pointing out his narrow-minded enthusiasm for futuristic technology. In this essay, I argue that Verne's originality lies precisely in his equivocal attitude towards modernity with its high technology. Verne, I suggest, does not reject technological modernity, but by dissecting it he reveals its propelling forces, high demands and price. He shows that the Enlightenment's Rule of Reason is, in the end, governed by the ancient passions of fear, bitterness and the thirst for revenge. It is this combination that makes the human condition tragic. Verne's Homeric imagination creates an epic hero—Captain Nemo—who personifies the remarkable alliance of modern science and ancient heroism.     

Kaleidoscopism: The Circulation of a Mid-Century Metaphor and Motif

Abstract

This essay traces the mid-century revival of interest in a particular nineteenth-century optical technology – David Brewster’s kaleidoscope – following P. B. Shelley’s coining of the term ‘kalleidoscopism’ to describe the broad popular appeal and enthusiastic uptake of the device in the late 1810s. Through an examination of mid-nineteenth-century fiction, journalism, and scientific writing, this essay explores what it meant to be ‘kaleidoscopic’ in this period and demonstrates how the mechanical structure and physical manipulation of the device informed this meaning. Controlled by the hand of the user, its display offered regulated surprise: a visual environment that did not overwhelm but rather enthralled viewers through its creation of abstracted, symmetrical forms and harmonious colour palettes led by individual taste. Contemporary reference to the kaleidoscope’s display and operation reveals it was increasingly aligned with notions of a stable, controlled, and unified visual environment in which mobility was valued but digression was mechanically impossible; it signalled the mastery of sensory data and the creation of meaning from fractured forms. My discussion uncovers new contexts for its popularity c. 1840–1865 in Victorian fiction, journalism, physiological science, and the fine arts, and discusses two under-studied examples of the kaleidoscopic in the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The essay concludes by exploring Brewster’s speculative application of the kaleidoscope as an early form of cinematic media, contending that this simple optical device provokes a reconsideration of the categorization of Victorian pre-cinematic technologies.