What Lula lacks: Grappling with the discourse of autism at home and in the field (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This paper examines the discourse of autism as we have experienced it as parents of an autistic six year‐old girl. Because both authors are anthropologists, we were professionally trained to understand something of what discourses are and do. However, our training did not necessarily help us blunt the original force of the diagnosis. Over time we have come to understand both our daughter and the discourse that is said to define her differently, and these understandings have fed back into our understanding of our discipline. One key transformative event occurred when we took our family to live in a village where we had done previous research. This reminded us of the conceptual power of discourses: we put the discourse of autism to work for our own purposes, but at the same time it works on us, shapes us in ways we do not always realize.     

From Plato to Pullman—The Circle of Invisibility and Parallel Worlds: Fortunatus,Mercury, and the Wishing-Hat,Part II

In this sequel to the article in the August edition of Folklore on the early German prose text Fortunatus, the history of the Wishing-Hat is continued up to the present with selective examples. Two major themes—the moral implications of invisibility, and the nature of movement through time and space—are examined in detail with reference to such texts as the Nibelungenlied, the tales of the Brothers Grimm, Plato's…Ring of Gyges fable, Keats's Lamia, Wells's Invisible Man, and Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy.     

The Translation of the Unseen Self: Fortunatus,Mercury and The Wishing-Hat

This article examines the popular early German prose text Fortunatus both as folktale and as mercantile myth, concentrating on the hitherto critically neglected Wishing-Hat, which is regarded in this essay as a descendant of the Petasus of Mercury. In the original Fortunatus text dating from 1509, there are many points of contact centred in the Hat, such as its appearance, the themes of speed, secrecy, invisibility, theft, and commerce, between Fortunatus and Mercury. The manner in which these themes were developed in subsequent German revisions of Fortunatus and in seventeenth-century English translations and adaptations of the text is discussed. From embodiment of knowledge to a signifier of multipresence, from being a representation of travel to an accessory to raptorial attack, the uses and meanings of the Wishing-Hat are seen to be many and varied.     

Food Deserts: Towards the Development of a Classification

Many people in developed countries fail to consume a healthy diet. This phenomenon has been linked to the contested existence of ‘food deserts’ in the UK, and the occurrence of ‘food insecurity’ in the USA and elsewhere. ‘Food deserts’ remain contested theoretical territory at least partly because no firm definition has been proposed. This paper argues that the barriers to consumption of a healthy diet may be classified according to whether such barriers are financial, physical, or derive from the mental attitude and knowledge of the consumer. The perception of ‘unsupportive food environments’ by some consumers is contrasted with the geographical existence of multiple sources of fresh fruit and vegetables in certain locations. Using a total of 234 semi—structured interviews in various UK locations, qualitative evidence is gathered for the existence of at least ten different types of ‘food desert’. The paper then goes on to show how such a three fold classification may be developed, using a modified ternary diagram, to assess the most appropriate initiatives to tackle ‘food deserts’ and to monitor progress in alleviating their effects.