Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Egas Moniz and the Origins of Psychosurgery: A Review Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Moniz's Nobel Prize

Modern psychosurgery began in 1936 with the work of the Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who attempted to treat the symptoms of mental illness by severing neural tracts in the frontal lobes. This procedure eventually became widespread and applied to thousands of institutionalized, psychotic patients in the United States and other countries. Despite serious side effects associated with psychosurgery, the apparent importance and validity of the treatment was recognized in 1949 when Moniz received the Nobel Prize for his innovation. Psychosurgery was largely replaced by anti-psychotic drugs in the mid-1950s, and the procedure and its practitioners rapidly fell into disrepute. This article reviews Moniz's career, the factors that led up to his first clinical trials of frontal lobe surgery, and the circumstances that allowed psychosurgery to flourish in the 1940s, eventually leading to Moniz's Nobel Prize.     

Imagining the Turkish nation through ‘othering’ Armenians*

Abstract. National identities are socially constructed and inherently relational, such that collective imagination depends on a dialectical opposition to another identity. The ontology of otherness becomes the necessary basis of social imagination. National identity can hardly be imagined without a narrative of myths, and the Turkish nation is no exception. This article argues that the Turkish nation was imagined as a modern nation with territorial sovereignty after the erosion of traditional Ottoman umma (religious community) identity. During the process of this imagination, the Armenians became the first ‘others’, whose claims over eastern Anatolia were perceived as a real threat to Turkish territoriality and identity. Based on the analysis of modernist theories of nationalism, the methodological concern of this study is twofold: to explore the causal link between the policies of Ottoman modernisation and the emergence of Turkish nationalism; and to incorporate the self and other nexus into the relationship between the emergence of Turkish nationalism and the process of ‘othering’ the Armenians.     

The Gothic and the Gaelic: Exploring the Place of Castles in Ireland’s Celtic Revival

This paper examines the conflict in early nineteenth century Ireland that emerged between the way castles were portrayed in academia on the one hand and romantic literature on the other. Focusing on a key text of the Celtic Revival, Sydney Owensons The Wild Irish Girl, the paper explores how this novel (with its strong gothic influences) established a lens through which Gaelic Ireland could be understood and how this in turn affected the representation of castles. The second part of the paper ties these themes into an analysis of the relationship between architecture, literature and identity in the occupation of Leap Castle, Co. Offaly during the changing political climate of nineteenth and early twentieth century Ireland.     

Egas Moniz and the origins of psychosurgery: a review commemorating the 50th anniversary of Moniz's Nobel Prize

Modern psychosurgery began in 1936 with the work of the Portuguese neurologist, Egas Moniz, who attempted to treat the symptoms of mental illness by severing neural tracts in the frontal lobes. This procedure eventually became widespread and applied to thousands of institutionalized, psychotic patients in the United States and other countries. Despite serious side effects associated with psychosurgery, the apparent importance and validity of the treatment was recognized in 1949 when Moniz received the Nobel Prize for his innovation. Psychosurgery was largely replaced by anti-psychotic drugs in the mid-1950s, and the procedure and its practitioners rapidly fell into disrepute. This article reviews Moniz's career, the factors that led up to his first clinical trials of frontal lobe surgery, and the circumstances that allowed psychosurgery to flourish in the 1940s, eventually leading to Moniz's Nobel Prize.     

Historicization of the culture concept

Recent criticisms for culture concept targeted a vision of culture as a hermetically sealed synchronic entity tied to a spatial unit. The article urges the historicization of the concept of culture itself, rather than discarding it altogether. Culture constitutes historical processes of the interpenetration between two mutually constituent forces: the global and the local. Culture through time requires a re‐examination of such concepts as “hybridity,”; “cosmopolitanism,”; and “historical discontinuity of the present from the past.”; Three cases of Japanese historical experiences are presented as examples of possible ways to historicize anthropology.     

The Triassic Mesophlebiidae,a little closer to the crown of the Odonata (Insecta) than other ‘triassolestids’

Abstract

Two new, subcomplete forewings belonging to the ‘triassolestid assemblage’, a group of Triassic stem-relatives of dragon- and damselflies (Odonata), are described. One, recovered from Australia (Aranbanga Volcanic Group), belongs to Mesophlebia antinodalis Tillyard, 1916, previously documented on the basis of two very incomplete wings. The other, recovered from South Africa (Molteno Formation), is assigned to a new species, Mesophlebia elegans sp. nov. The new data allow a reconsideration of the diagnosis of the genus Mesophlebia Tillyard, 1916 and a re-instatement of the family Mesophlebiidae Tillyard, 1916. Notably, the new specimens possess, near the wing base, a posterior lobe absent in most ‘triassolestid’ genera, but present in crown-Odonata and a number of their stem-relatives. Lobodonata tax. nov. is erected to accommodate odonates possessing this lobe. The nature of the ‘vein-like’ element anteriorly delimiting this lobe is discussed. We submit that it might have been initially composed of an invagination of the posterior wing-margin (‘fibula’), which was later captured by AA, imposing its course on CuP.

Ayla Tierney [ayla.tierney@qm.qld.gov.au], Queensland Museum, PO Box 3300, South Brisbane BC, Queensland 4101, Australia; Isabelle Deregnaucourt [isabelle.deregnaucourt@edu.mnhn.fr], Sorbonne Université, MNHN, CNRS, Centre de recherche sur la paléontologie – Paris (CR2P), 57 rue Cuvier, CP38, F-75005 Paris, France; John M. Anderson [jmanderson.gondwana@gmail.com], Evolutionary Studies Institute, Witwatersrand University, 1 Jan Smuts Ave., Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2000, South Africa; Paul Tierney [paul.tierney@qm.qld.gov.au], Queensland Museum, PO Box 3300, South Brisbane BC, Queensland 4101, Australia; Torsten Wappler [torsten.wappler@hlmd.de], Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Friedensplatz 1, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany; Olivier Béthoux [obethoux@mnhn.fr], Sorbonne Université, MNHN, CNRS, Centre de recherche sur la paléontologie – Paris (CR2P), 57 rue Cuvier, CP38, F-75005 Paris, France.