One, two! one, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
Un deux, un deux, par le milieu,
Le glaive vorpal fait pat-à-pan!
La bête défaite, avec sa tête,
Il rentre gallomphant.
Eins, Zwei! Eins, Zwei! Und durch und durch
Seins vorpals Schwert zerschniferschnück.
Da blieb es todt! Er, Kopf in Hand,
Geläumfig zog zurück!
The late Victor Proetz was by vocation a visual artist who created many distinguished architectural and decorative designs. His favorite avocation, however, was to explore the possibilities (and impossibilities) of words, especially words in translation, and to share his discoveries. As Alastair Reid says in his foreword, "He turned words over in his head, he listened to them, he unraveled them, he looked them up, he played with them, he passed them on like presents, all with an unjadeable astonishment."
What, Proetz wondered, do some of the familiar and not-so-familiar works of English and American literature sound like in French? In German? "How," he asked, "do you say 'Yankee Doodle' in French—if you can?" And "How do they say 'Hounyhnhnm' and 'Cheshire Cat' and things like that in German?" And, in either language, "How, in God's name, can you possibly say 'There she blows!'?"
This book, unfortunately left incomplete on his death in 1966, contains many of his answers. They are given not only in the assembled texts and translations but also in his wry, curious, sometimes hilarious commentaries. None of it is scholarly in any formal, academic sense—"and yet," Reid reminds us, "his is precisely the kind of enthusiastic curiosity that gives scholarship its pointers."
In 2006 anthropologists Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett set out to rethink the role that human sciences play in biological research, creating the Human Practices division of the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center—a facility established to create design standards for the engineering of new enzymes, genetic circuits, cells, and other biological entities—to formulate a new approach to the ethical, security, and philosophical considerations of controversial biological work. They sought not simply to act as watchdogs but to integrate the biosciences with their own discipline in a more fundamentally interdependent way, inventing a new, dynamic, and experimental anthropology that they could bring to bear on the center’s biological research.
Designing Human Practices is a detailed account of this anthropological experiment and, ultimately, its rejection. It provides new insights into the possibilities and limitations of collaboration, and diagnoses the micro-politics which effectively constrained the potential for mutual scientific flourishing. Synthesizing multiple disciplines, including biology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy, alongside a thorough examination of funding entities such as the National Science Foundation, Designing Human Practices pushes the social study of science into new and provocative territory, utilizing a real-world experience as a springboard for timely reflections on how the human and life sciences can and should transform each other.
A fascinating ethnography of microbes that opens up new spaces for anthropological inquiry
The trillions of microbes in and on our bodies are determined by not only biology but also our social connections. Gut Anthro tells the fascinating story of how a sociocultural anthropologist developed a collaborative “anthropology of microbes” with a human microbial ecologist to address global health crises across disciplines. It asks: what would it mean for anthropology to act with science? Based partly at a preeminent U.S. lab studying the human microbiome, the Center for Genome Sciences at Washington University, and partly at a field site in Bangladesh studying infant malnutrition, it examines how microbes travel between human guts in the “field” and in microbiome laboratories, influencing definitions of health and disease, and how the microbiome can change our views on evolution, agency, and life.
As lab scientists studied the interrelationships between gut microbes and malnutrition in resource-poor countries, Amber Benezra explored ways to reconcile the scale and speed differences between the lab, the intimate biosocial practices of Bangladeshi mothers and their children, and the looming structural violence of poverty. In vital ways, Gut Anthro is about what it means to collaborate—with mothers, local field researchers in Bangladesh, massive philanthropic global health organizations, with the microbiome scientists, and, of course, with microbes. It follows microbes through various enactments in scientific research—microbes as kin, as data, and as race. Revealing how racial categories are used in microbiome research, Benezra argues that microbial differences need transdisciplinary collaboration to address racial health disparities without reifying race as a straightforward biological or social designation.
Gut Anthro is a tour de force of science studies and medical anthropology as well as an intensely personal and deeply theoretical accounting of what it means to do anthropology today.
Cover alt text:
Black background overlaid with a pink organic path suggestive of a human digestive system. Title appears within the guts as if being processed.
Popular culture remembers the settling of the Midwest as a golden era of unbounded opportunity, a time when every farm was a family farm and every farmer glowed with health. Pioneers in nineteenth-century Iowa, however, had to battle a formidable host of diseases during this golden era—malaria was endemic, smallpox and dysentery occurred in widespread epidemics, and typhoid, cholera, scarlet fever, and diphtheria had their seasons. Physicians in the growing Hawkeye State had little of the status and skill they command today, and herbalists, hydropaths, eclectics, Thomsonians, and homeopaths competed with purveyors of home remedies and patent medicines for their services.
The druggists of pioneer Iowa were artisan producers who compounded and prescribed botanical and chemical medicines, sold a variety of other merchandise from perfumes to paints, and dispensed the secret concoctions known as patent medicines, guaranteed to cure any condition, however alarming. In this compelling study, Lee Anderson tells the story of these early pharmacists and their hard-fought quest to legitimize their profession. While he confronts the politics of professionalism and the purpose of the pharmaceutical science and education, he also illuminates the mutual role of physicians and pharmacists in frontier health care.
With skill and humor, Anderson recreates an exciting time in midwestern history and provides insights into national issues of professionalism in medicine. His study will appeal to scholars in the history of medicine, pharmacy, and professionalism and to everyone interested in the history of the Midwest.
A daily glass of wine prolongs life—yet alcohol can cause life-threatening cancer. Some say raising the minimum wage will decrease inequality while others say it increases unemployment. Scientists once confidently claimed that hormone replacement therapy reduced the risk of heart disease but now they equally confidently claim it raises that risk. What should we make of this endless barrage of conflicting claims?
Observation and Experiment is an introduction to causal inference by one of the field’s leading scholars. An award-winning professor at Wharton, Paul Rosenbaum explains key concepts and methods through lively examples that make abstract principles accessible. He draws his examples from clinical medicine, economics, public health, epidemiology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry to explain how randomized control trials are conceived and designed, how they differ from observational studies, and what techniques are available to mitigate their bias.
“Carefully and precisely written…reflecting superb statistical understanding, all communicated with the skill of a master teacher.”
—Stephen M. Stigler, author of The Seven Pillars of Statistical Wisdom
“An excellent introduction…Well-written and thoughtful…from one of causal inference’s noted experts.”
—Journal of the American Statistical Association
“Rosenbaum is a gifted expositor…an outstanding introduction to the topic for anyone who is interested in understanding the basic ideas and approaches to causal inference.”
—Psychometrika
“A very valuable contribution…Highly recommended.”
—International Statistical Review
Since the fall of communism, Russia has witnessed a dramatic struggle between old and new, continuity and change. Corruption and violence have plagued society. Most people have benefited little from the new capitalist order. But positive changes are evident. Russians can speak and act more freely in a state that no longer intrudes on their privacy. They are able to travel abroad, enjoy unprecedented access to information from around the world, and organize and campaign for improvement in their living conditions.
In this engrossing account Robert Service traces the formation of the new Russia from the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present. He paints a fascinating picture of a people in metamorphosis. In wide-ranging discussions on topics from Kremlin politics to rock music and macroeconomics to contemporary poetry, Service takes us inside to witness the changes from both the top down and the bottom up. He examines the reforms of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations in the context of the complex communist legacy, deftly interweaving political history, intellectual thought, and popular consciousness to illuminate the real difficulties Russia has faced on its rocky path to reform.
For the second time in less than a century, the Russians have been engaged in a fundamental reshaping of their society, and the results will prove of vital importance to the global community. Robert Service has provided a valuable and engaging guide to their recent remarkable journey.
Selectivity and Discord addresses the fundamental question of whether there are grounds for belief in experimental results. Specifically, Allan Franklin is concerned with two problems in the use of experimental results in science: selectivity of data or analysis procedures and the resolution of discordant results.
By means of detailed case studies of episodes from the history of modern physics, Franklin shows how these problems can be—and are—solved in the normal practice of science and, therefore, that experimental results may be legitimately used as a basis for scientific knowledge.
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